Frequently Asked Questions

Carbon Aware FAQs

Why?

Why should I move my workloads?
It's one of the smallest and easiest possible changes you can make which saves a whole load of carbon emissions and probably cost.
Why would running in a different State/Country make any difference?

Regions of the world are supplied by different types of power. When the sun shines in California it produces a surplus of electricity on most days which should be used. Shifting your workload from Texas to California produces serious emissions savings.

The Nordics/Scandinavia are amazing places becuase of their use of Hydro and Wind power. France has consistently low emissions because it produces mostly nuclear power - chat with your ESG department on where they stand with this (we think it's not a problem)

Data Quality

Is your data up to date?
For most supported countries, yes. We often see 3+ hour delays from Germany and occasionally France. The CarbonAware API will only return data within the last 3 hours and will prioritize regions updated within the last 90 minutes.
Can I trust the emissions values
We use IPCC emissions values for the most part and actual values for some countries if available. We are interested in providing indicitave rather than absolute values - commonsense decisions like running workloads in hydro powered regions like Sweden should always win.

Privacy and Data Protection

Isn't it a privacy problem to run workloads elsewhere?

Potentially if you are building in secret keys or requiring super secret highly valuable proprietry code in which case your Security and/or DevOps team will be able to give recommendations.

Most things are End-to-End encrypted nowadays; pulling from github, installing npm/go/maven dependencies, pushing containers, hard drives etc... so for the majority of workloads running them in another country should not carry any strong risk.

Most uses of CI services do not have any control over where the runners are built in any case.