To conclude Impact Week, which has been filled with announcements about new initiatives and features that we are thrilled about, today we are publishing our 2022 Impact Report.

In short, the Impact Report is an annual summary highlighting how we are helping build a better Internet and the progress we are making on our environmental, social, and governance priorities. It is where we showcase successes from Cloudflare Impact programs, celebrate awards and recognitions, and explain our approach to fundamental values like transparency and privacy.

We believe that a better Internet is principled, for everyone, and sustainable; these are the three themes around which we constructed the report. The Impact Report also serves as our repository for disclosures consistent with our commitments for the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), and UN Global Compact (UNGC).

Check out the full report to:

• Explore how we are expanding the value and scope of our Cloudflare Impact programs

• Review our latest diversity statistics — and our newest employee resource group

• Understand how we are supporting humanitarian and human rights causes

• Read quick summaries of Impact Week announcements

• Examine how we calculate and validate emissions data

As fantastic as 2022 has been for scaling up Cloudflare Impact and making strides toward a better Internet, we are aiming even higher in 2023. To keep up with developments throughout the year, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, and keep an eye out for updates on our Cloudflare Impact page.

In July 2021, Cloudflare described that although we did not start out with the goal to reduce the Internet's environmental impact, that has changed. Our mission is to help build a better Internet, and clearly a better Internet must be sustainable.

As we continue to hunt for efficiencies in every component of our network hardware, every piece of software we write, and every Internet protocol we support, we also want to understand in terms of Internet architecture how moving network security, performance, and reliability functions like those offered by Cloudflare from on-premise solutions to the cloud affects sustainability.

To that end, earlier this year we commissioned a study from the consulting firm Analysys Mason to evaluate the relative carbon efficiency of network functions like firewalls, WAF, SD-WAN, DDoS protection, content servers, and others that are provided through Cloudflare against similar on-premise solutions.

Although the full report will not be available until next year, we are pleased to share that according to initial findings:

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF) "generates up to around 90% less carbon than on-premises appliances at low-medium traffic demand."

Needless to say, we are excited about the possibilities of these early findings, and look forward to the full report which early indications suggest will show more ways in which moving to Cloudflare will help reduce your infrastructure’s carbon footprint. However, like most things at Cloudflare, we see this as only the beginning.

The Internet has a number of environmental impacts that need to be addressed, including raw material extraction, water consumption by data centers, and recycling and e-waste, among many others. But, none of those are more urgent than energy and emissions.

According to the United Nations, energy generation is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for approximately 35% of global emissions. If you think about all the power needed to run servers, routers, switches, data centers, and Internet exchanges around the world, it's not surprising that the Boston Consulting Group found that 2% of all carbon output, about 1 billion metric tons per year, is attributable to the Internet.

Conceptually, reducing emissions from energy consumption is relatively straightforward — transition to zero emissions energy sources, and use energy more efficiently in order to speed that transition.  However, practically, applying those concepts to a geographically distributed, disparate networks and systems like the global Internet is infinitely more difficult.

To date, much has been written about improving efficiency or individual pieces of network hardware (like Cloudflare's deployment of more efficient Arm CPUs) and the power usage efficiency or "PUE" of hyperscale data centers. However, we think there are significant efficiency gains to be made throughout all layers of the network stack, as well as the basic architecture of the Internet itself. We think this study is the first step in investigating those underexplored areas.

Because the final report is still being written, we'll have more information about its methodology upon publication. But, here is what we know so far.

To estimate the relative carbon savings of moving enterprise network functions, like those offered by Cloudflare, to the cloud, the Analysys Mason team is evaluating a wide range of enterprise network functions. These include firewalls, WAF, SD-WAN, DDoS protection, and content servers. For each function they are modeling a variety of scenarios, including usage, different sizes and types of organizations, and different operating conditions.

Information relating to the power and capacity of each on-premise appliance is being sourced from public data sheets from relevant vendors. Information on Cloudflare’s energy consumption is being compiled from internal datasets of total power usage of Cloudflare servers, and the allocation of CPU resources and traffic between different products.

According to the Analysys Mason team, we should expect the final report sometime in early 2023. Until then, we do want to mention again that the initial WAF results described above may be subject to change as the project continues, and assumptions and methodology are refined. Regardless, we think these are exciting developments and look forward to sharing the full report soon!

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At Cloudflare, we are working hard to ensure that we are making a positive impact on the surrounding environment, with the goal of building the most sustainable network. At the same time, we want to make sure that the positive changes that we are making are also something that our local Cloudflare team members can touch and feel, and know that in each of our actions we are having a positive impact on the environment around us. This is why we make sustainability one of the underlying goals of the design, construction, and operations of our global office spaces.

To make this type of pervasive change we have focused our efforts in three main areas: working with sustainable construction materials, efficient operations, and renewable energy purchasing (using clean sources like sunlight and wind). We believe that sustainable design goes far beyond just purchasing recycled and regenerative products. If you don’t operate your space with efficiency and renewables in mind, we haven’t fully accounted for all of our environmental impact.

__“The Retreat” in the San Francisco Cloudflare office, featuring preserved moss and live plants__‌‌

Since 2020, we have been redefining how our teams work together, and how work takes place in physical spaces. You may have read last year about how we are thinking about the future of work at Cloudflare - and the experimentation that we are doing within our physical environments. Sustainable and healthy spaces are a major element to this concept.

We are excited to highlight a few of the different products and concepts that are currently being used in the development of our workplaces - both new locations and in the reimagination of our existing spaces. While experimenting with the way that our teams work together in person, we also consider our new and updated spaces a sort of sustainability learning lab. As we get more and more data on these different systems, we plan to expand these concepts to other global locations as we continue to think through the future of the in-office experience at Cloudflare.

An example of sustainable acoustic baffles as seen in our San Francisco office

It’s our goal to have the products, furniture, and systems that make up our offices be sustainable in a way that is pleasantly (and surprisingly) pervasive. Their materials, construction, and transportation should have either a minimal, or regenerative, impact on the environment or the waste stream while also meeting high performance standards. A great example of this is the acoustic sound baffling used in our recent San Francisco and London redesign and currently being installed at our newest office, which is under construction.

If you’ve ever worked in an open office, you know that effective sound management is critical, regardless of if the space is for collaborative or focus work. In order to help with this challenge, we use a substantial number of acoustic baffles to help significantly reduce sound transfer. Traditionally, baffles are made out of tightly woven synthetic fibers. Unfortunately, a majority of baffles on the market today generate new plastic in the waste stream.

We chose to move away from traditional baffles by installing FilaSorb acoustic baffles by AcouFelt. The fibers in FilaSorb are made from post-consumer plastic beverage bottles diverted from landfills. Every square foot of our FilaSorb felt contains the regenerated fibers made from over 10, 20oz recycled bottles. Each panel has a useful life of over twenty years, and at the end of its life the panel can be recycled again.

The International Institute of Living Futures has certified that this product is acceptable for the Living Building Challenge, which is the most rigorous regenerative building standard in the world.

Similarly to FilaSorb, we also installed BAUX Acoustic Wood Wool paneling to provide additional sound dampening and a vibrant acoustic wall treatment. Designed using a process that focuses on recarbonation, BAUX Wood Wool panels absorb over 6.9 kg per meter squared of carbon dioxide. That’s a little over 70% of the total measured CO2 released during the entire manufacturing life cycle of the panel. Beyond their acoustic benefits, Wood Wool panels resist heat and are ideal insulators. This enables us to use less energy in heating and cooling to maintain a stable temperature in fluctuating weather.

Interface’s Net Effect Carpet Collection uses discarded fishing nets in their construction

Flooring is also a significant focus of our design team. We wanted to find a high wearing material that had brilliant color that also had strong regenerative properties across the full manufacturing lifecycle. We were very fortunate to have found Interface’s Net Effect Collection. Interface is one of the few fully certified carbon-neutral flooring materials providers.

Their Net Effect collection is made with 100% recycled content nylon, including postconsumer nylon from discarded fishing nets gathered through their Net-Works® partnership. Net-Works provides a source of income for small fishing villages in the Philippines while cleaning up their beaches and waters. The collected nets are sold to Aquafil, who, in turn, converts them into yarn for Interface carpet tile.

One shocking stat specifically has stood out to our team over the past two and half years as we have been rethinking our office spaces. 8.5 million tons of office furniture ends up in the landfill per year. That number was before the global pandemic completely redefined how companies think about their real estate footprints and shuttered a massive amount of office space in the United States. Major US cities like San Francisco and New York City still have commercial office vacancy rates upwards of 30% at the time of publishing. To do our part to keep furniture out of landfills, we are ensuring that we are reusing (and in some cases completely repurposing) our existing furniture portfolio as much as possible in every one of our projects.

We have taken it a step further to include our employees working from home. We commonly lend out office chairs and other unused office furniture to home office workers so that they don’t have to purchase new office furniture.

Rainwater harvesting system at our San Francisco office

We haven’t just been thinking about how our construction materials can have a more positive impact on the environment. We’ve also been incredibly focused on trialing a number of different sustainable operations concepts within our spaces.

For instance, we have installed a 500 gallon rainwater harvesting system above our outdoor bike storage in our San Francisco office, designed to support our internal gray water needs. We understand the importance of natural light and plants within our spaces to help encourage the health and wellbeing of our teammates, thus we have a vast amount of plants in our San Francisco office. While we chose our plants for their low water consumption, they still require water. Our rain water capture system provides the water for all of our plants.

Additionally, we are focused on cultural changes amongst our staff to reduce our waste streams (which was no small feat amongst our die-hard LaCroix fans!). We have adopted Bevi sparkling and flavored water dispensing machines alongside traditional soda fountains to fully remove bottled water from our facilities. We also shifted to bulk snacks to further reduce the packaging entering recycling centers and landfills.

Our San Francisco office is also giving us direct on the ground exposure to the complexities of renewable power sourcing in a shared grid environment. In order to guarantee we are using all renewable energy, we purchase our power through Pacific Gas and Electric’s Supergreen Service. But we don’t just stop there. To ensure that our energy usage is totally based on renewable power, we take our efforts a step further and separately purchase renewable energy as if we didn’t already have sustainable power.

We are just getting started on our sustainability journey at Cloudflare. Over the next few years, we will continue to design, develop, and deploy a variety of different solutions to help make our offices as regenerative as possible. To leave you with a taste of where we are headed in 2023, I am excited to introduce you to a project that we are all very excited about: EntroBees. As you have likely heard, the global bee population has dropped dramatically, and a quarter of the bee species are at risk of extinction. We want to do our part to help encourage bees to thrive in urban environments.

Slated for installation at one of our global office locations, EntroBees will be fully managed onsite honey bee colonies. These colonies will provide a much-needed habitat for urban bees, produce honey for our local employees, and also serve as an additional source of entropy for our LavaRand system that provides the source of randomness for Cloudflare’s entire encryption system.

Once a year, we pull data from our Bot Fight Mode to determine the number of trees we can donate to our partners at One Tree Planted. It's part of the commitment we made in 2019 to deter malicious bots online by redirecting them to a challenge page that requires them to perform computationally intensive, but meaningless tasks. While we use these tasks to drive up the bill for bot operators, we account for the carbon cost by planting trees.

This year when we pulled the numbers, we saw something exciting. While the number of bot detections has gone significantly up, the time bots spend in the Bot Fight Mode challenge page has gone way down. We’ve observed that bot operators are giving up quickly, and moving on to other, unprotected targets. Bot Fight Mode is getting smarter at detecting bots and more efficient at deterring bot operators, and that’s a win for Cloudflare and the environment.

We’ve seen two changes this year in the Bot Fight Mode results. First, the time attackers spend in Bot Fight Mode challenges has reduced by 166%. Many bot operators are disconnecting almost immediately now from Cloudflare challenge pages. We expect this is because they’ve noticed the sharp cost increase associated with our CPU intensive challenge and given up. Even though we’re seeing individual bot operators give up quickly, Bot Fight Mode is busier than ever. We’re issuing six times more CPU intensive challenges per day compared to last year, thanks to a new detection system written using Cloudflare’s ruleset engine, detailed below.

When Bot Fight Mode launched, we highlighted one of our core detection systems:

“Handwritten rules for simple bots that, however simple, get used day in, day out.”

Some of them are still very simple. We introduce new simple rules regularly when we detect new software libraries as they start to source a significant amount of traffic. However, we started to reach the limitations of this system. We knew there were sophisticated bots out there that we could identify easily, but they shared enough overlapping traits with good browser traffic that we couldn’t safely deploy new rules to block them safely without potentially impacting our customers’ good traffic as well.

To solve this problem, we built a new rules system written on the same highly performant Ruleset Engine that powers the new WAF, Transform Rules, and Cache Rules, rather than the old Gagarin heuristics engine that was fast but inflexible. This new framework gives us the flexibility we need to write highly complex rules to catch more elusive bots without the risk of interfering with legitimate traffic. The data gathered by these new detections are then labeled and used to train our Machine Learning engine, ensuring we will continue to catch these bots as their operators attempt to adapt.

We’ve heard from Bot Fight Mode customers that they need more flexibility. Website operators now expect a significant percentage of their legitimate traffic to come from automated sources, like service to service APIs. These customers are waiting to enable Bot Fight Mode until they can tell us what parts of their website it can run on safely. In 2023, we will give everyone the ability to write their own flexible Bot Fight Mode rules, so that every Cloudflare customer can join the fight against bots!

Source: One Tree Planted

We're also pleased to report the second tree planting project from our 2021 bot activity is now complete! Earlier this year, Cloudflare contributed 25,000 trees to a restoration project at Victoria Park in Nova Scotia.

For our second project, we donated 10,000 trees to a much larger restoration project on the eastern shoreline of Kumirmari island in the Sundarbans of West Bengal, India. In total, the project included more than 415,000 trees along 7.74 hectares of land in areas that have been degraded or deforested. The types of trees planted included Bain, Avicennia officianalis, Kalo Bain, and eight others.

The Sundarbans are located on the delta of the Ganges, Brahmaptura, and Meghna rivers on the Bay of Bengal, and are home to one of the world's largest mangrove forests. The forest is not only a UNESCO World Heritage site, but also home to 260 bird species as well as a number of threatened species like the Bengal tiger, the estuarine crocodile, and Indian python. According to One Tree Planted, the Sundarbans are currently under threat from rising sea levels, increasing salinity in the water and soil, cyclonic storms, and flooding.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has found that mangroves are critical to mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and protecting coastal communities from extreme weather events caused by climate change. The Sundarbans mangrove forest is one of the world's largest carbon sinks (an area that absorbs more carbon than it emits). One study suggested that coastal mangrove forests sequester carbon at a rate of two to four times that of a mature tropical or subtropical forest region.

One of the most exciting parts of this project was its focus on hiring and empowering local women. According to One Tree Planted, 75 percent of those involved in the project were women, including 85 women employed to monitor and manage the planting site over a five-month period. Participants also received training in the seed collection process with the goal of helping local residents lead mangrove planting from start to finish in the future.

Thanks to every Cloudflare customer who’s enabled Bot Fight Mode so far. You’ve helped make the Internet a better place by stopping malicious bots, and you’ve helped make the planet a better place by reforesting the Earth on bot operators’ dime. The more domains that use Bot Fight Mode, the more trees we can plant, so sign up for Cloudflare and activate Bot Fight Mode today!

Whether you are building a global network or buying groceries, some rules of sustainable living remain the same: be thoughtful about what you get, make the most out of what you have, and try to upcycle your waste rather than throwing it away. These rules are central to Cloudflare — we take helping build a better Internet seriously, and we define this as not just having the most secure, reliable, and performant network — but also the most sustainable one.

With incredible growth of the Internet, and the increased usage of Cloudflare’s network, even linear improvements to sustainability in our hardware today will result in exponential gains in the future. We want to use this post to outline how we think about the sustainability impact of the hardware in our network, and what we’re doing to continually mitigate that impact.

The total carbon footprint of a server is approximately 6 tons of Carbon Dioxide equivalent (CO2eq) when used in the US. There are four parts to the carbon footprint of any computing device:

1. The embodied emissions: source materials and production

2. Packing and shipping

3. Use of the product

4. End of life.

The emissions from the actual operations and use of a server account for the vast majority of the total life-cycle impact. The secondary impact is embodied emissions (which is the carbon footprint from the creation of the device in the first place), which is about 10% overall.

It’s difficult to reduce the total emissions for the operation of servers. If there’s a workload that needs computing power, the server will complete the workload and use the energy required to complete it. What we can do, however, is consistently seek to improve the amount of computing output per kilo of CO2 emissions — and the way we do that is to consistently upgrade our hardware to the most power-efficient designs. As we switch from one generation of server to the next, we often see very large increases in computing output, at the same level of power consumption. In this regard, given energy is a large cost for our business, our incentives of reducing our environmental impact are naturally aligned to our business model.

The other large category of emissions — the embodied emissions — are a domain where we actually have a lot more control than the use of the product. Reminder from before: the embodied carbon means the sources of emissions generated outside of equipments' operation. How can we reduce the embodied emissions involved in running a fleet of servers? Turns out, there are a few ways: modular design, relying on open vs proprietary standards to enable reuse, and recycling.

The first big opportunity is through modular system design. Modular systems are a great way of reducing embodied carbon, as they result in fewer new components and allow for parts that don’t have efficiency upgrades to be leveraged longer. Modular server design is essentially decomposing functions of the motherboard onto sub-boards so that the server owner can selectively upgrade the components that are required for their use cases.

How much of an impact can modular design have? Well, if 30% of the server is delivering meaningful efficiency gains (usually CPU and memory, sometimes I/O), we may really need to upgrade those in order to meet efficiency goals, but creating an additional 70% overhead in embodied carbon (i.e. the rest of the server, which often is made up of components that do not get more efficient) is not logical. Modular design allows us to upgrade the components that will improve the operational efficiency of our data centers, but amortize carbon in the “glue logic” components over the longer time periods for which they can continue to function.

Previously, many systems providers drove ridiculous and useless changes in the peripherals (custom I/Os, outputs that may not be needed for a specific use case such as VGA for crash carts we might not use given remote operations, etc.), which would force a new motherboard design for every new CPU socket design. By standardizing those interfaces across vendors, we can now only source the components we need, and reuse a larger percentage of systems ourselves. This trend also helps with reliability (sub-boards are more well tested), and supply assurance (since standardized subcomponent boards can be sourced from more vendors), something all of us in the industry have had top-of-mind given global supply challenges of the past few years.

But even with modularity, components need to go somewhere after they’ve been deprecated — and historically, this place has been a landfill. There is demand for second-hand servers, but many have been parts of closed systems with proprietary firmware and BIOS, so repurposing them has been costly or impossible to integrate into new systems. The economics of a circular economy are such that service fees for closed firmware and BIOS support as well as proprietary interconnects or ones that are not standardized can make reuse prohibitively expensive. How do you solve this? Well, if servers can be supported using open source firmware and BIOS, you dramatically reduce the cost of reusing the parts — so that another provider can support the new customer.

Beyond that, though, there are parts failures, or parts that are simply no longer economical to be run, even in the second hand market. Metal recycling can always be done, and some manufacturers are starting to invest in programs there, although the energy investment for extracting the usable elements sometimes doesn’t make sense. There is innovation in this domain, Zhan, et al. (2020) developed an environmentally friendly and efficient hydrothermal-buffering technique for the recycling of GaAs-based ICs, achieving gallium and arsenic recovery rates of 99.9 and 95.5% respectively. Adoption is still limited — most manufacturers are discussing water recycling and renewable energy vs. full-fledged recycling of metals — but we’re closely monitoring the space to take advantage of any further innovation that happens.

It is great to talk about these concepts, but we are doing this work today. I’d describe them as being under two main banners: taking steps to reduce embodied emissions through modular and open standards design, and also using the most power-efficient solutions for our workloads.

Our next generation of servers, Gen 12, will be coming soon. We’re emphasizing modular-driven design, as well as a focus on open standards, to enable reuse of the components inside the servers.

Historically, every generation of server here at Cloudflare has required a massive redesign. An upgrade to a new CPU required a new motherboard, power supply, chassis, memory DIMMs, and BMC. This, in turn, might mean new fans, storage, network cards, and even cables. However, many of these components are not changing drastically from generation to generation: these components are built using older manufacturing processes, and leverage interconnection protocols that do not require the latest speeds.

To help illustrate this, let’s look at our Gen 11 server today: a single socket server is ~450W of power, with the CPU and associated memory taking about 320W of that (potentially 360W at peak load). All the other components on that system (mentioned above) are ~100W of operational power (mostly dominated by fans, which is why so many companies are exploring alternative cooling designs), so they are not where the optimization efforts or newer ICs will greatly improve the system’s efficiency. So, instead of rebuilding all those pieces from scratch for every new server and generating that much more embodied carbon, we are reusing them as often as possible.

By disaggregating components that require changes for efficiency reasons from other system-level functions (storage, fans, BMCs, programmable logic devices, etc.), we are able to maximize reuse of electronic components across generations. Building systems modularly like this significantly reduces our embodied carbon footprint over time. Consider how much waste would be eliminated if you were able to upgrade your car's engine to improve its efficiency without changing the rest of the parts that are working well, like the frame, seats, and windows. That's what modular design is enabling in data centers like ours across the world.

We, as an industry, have to work together to accelerate interoperability across interfaces, standards, and vendors if we want to achieve true modularity and our goal of a 70% reduction in e-waste. We have begun this effort by leveraging standard add-in-card form factors (OCP 2.0 and 3.0 NICs, Datacenter Secure Control Module for our security and management modules, etc.) and our next server design is leveraging Datacenter Modular Hardware System, an open-source design specification that allows for modular subcomponents to be connected across common buses (regardless of the system manufacturer). This technique allows us to maintain these components over multiple generations without having to incur more carbon debt on parts that don’t change as often as CPUs and memory.

In order to enable a more comprehensive circular economy, Cloudflare has made extensive and increasing use of open-source solutions, like OpenBMC, a requirement for all of our vendors, and we work to ensure fixes are upstreamed to the community. Open system firmware allows for greater security through auditability, but the most important factor for sustainability is that a new party can assume responsibility and support for that server, which allows systems that might otherwise have to be destroyed to be reused. This ensures that (other than data-bearing assets, which are destroyed based on our security policy) 99% of hardware used by Cloudflare is repurposed, reducing the number of new servers that need to be built to fulfill global capacity demand. Further details about the specifics of how that happens – and how you can join our vision of reducing e-waste – you can find in this blog post.

The other big way we can push for sustainability (in our hardware) while responding to our exponential increase in demand without wastefully throwing more servers at the problem is simple in concept, and difficult in practice: testing and deploying more power-efficient architectures and tuning them for our workloads. This means not only evaluating the efficiency of our next generation of servers and networking gear, but also reducing hardware and energy waste in our fleet.

Currently, in production, we see that Gen 11 servers can handle about 25% more requests than Gen 10 servers for the same amount of energy. This is about what we expected when we were testing in mid-2021, and is exciting to see given that we continue to launch new products and services we couldn’t test at that time.

System power efficiency is not as simple a concept as it used to be for us. Historically, the key metric for assessing efficiency has been requests per second per watt. This metric allowed for multi-generational performance comparisons when qualifying new generations of servers, but it was really designed with our historical core product suite in mind.

We want – and, as a matter of scaling, require – our global network to be an increasingly intelligent threat detection mechanism, and also a highly performant development platform for our customers. As anyone who’s looked at a benchmark when shopping for a new computer knows, fast performance in one domain (traditional benchmarks such as SpecInt_Rate, STREAM, etc.) does not necessarily mean fast performance in another (e.g. AI inference, video processing, bulk object storage). The validation testing process for our next generation of server needs to take all of these workloads and their relative prevalence into account — not just requests. The deep partnership between hardware and software that Cloudflare can have is enabling optimization opportunities that other companies running third party code cannot pursue. I often say this is one of our superpowers, and this is the opportunity that makes me most excited about my job every day.

The other way we can be both sustainable and efficient is by leveraging domain-specific accelerators. Accelerators are a wide field, and we’ve seen incredible opportunities with application-level ones (see our recent announcement on AV1 hardware acceleration for Cloudflare Stream) as well as infrastructure accelerators (sometimes referred to as Smart NICs). That said, adding new silicon to our fleet is only adding to the problem if it isn’t as efficient as the thing it’s replacing, and a node-level performance analysis often misses the complexity of deployment in a fleet as distributed as ours, so we’re moving quickly but cautiously.

We’re pushing by ourselves as hard as we can, but there are certain areas where the industry as a whole needs to step up.

In particular: there is a woeful lack of standards about emissions reporting for server component manufacturing and operation, so we are engaging with standards bodies like the Open Compute Project to help define sustainability metrics for the industry at large. This post explains how we are increasing our efficiency and decreasing our carbon footprint generationally, but there should be a clear methodology that we can use to ensure that you know what kind of businesses you are supporting.

The Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol initiative is doing a great job developing internationally accepted GHG accounting and reporting standards for business and to promote their broad adoption. They define scope 1 emissions to be the “direct carbon accounting of a reporting company’s operations” which is somewhat easy to calculate, and quantify scope 3 emissions as “the indirect value chain emissions.” To have standardized metrics across the entire life cycle of generating equipment, we need the carbon footprint of the subcomponents’ manufacturing process, supply chains, transportation, and even the construction methods used in building our data centers.

Ensuring embodied carbon is measured consistently across vendors is a necessity for building industry-standard, defensible metrics.

The carbon impact of the cloud has a meaningful impact on the Earth–by some accounts, the ICT footprint will be 21% of global energy demand by 2030. We’re absolutely committed to keeping Cloudflare’s footprint on the planet as small as possible. If you’ve made it this far through, and you’re interested in contributing to building the most global, efficient, and sustainable network on the Internet — the Hardware Systems Engineering team is hiring. Come join us.

Today, as part of Cloudflare’s Impact Week, we’re excited to announce an opportunity for Cloudflare customers to make it easier to decommission and dispose of their used hardware appliances sustainably. We’re partnering with Iron Mountain to offer preferred pricing and discounts for Cloudflare customers that recycle or remarket legacy hardware through its service.

Cloudflare’s products enable customers to replace legacy hardware appliances with our global network. Connecting to our network enables access to firewall (including WAF and Network Firewalls, Intrusion Detection Systems, etc), DDoS mitigation, VPN replacement, WAN optimization, and other networking and security functions that were traditionally delivered in physical hardware. These are served from our network and delivered as a service. This creates a myriad of benefits for customers including stronger security, better performance, lower operational overhead, and none of the headaches of traditional hardware like capacity planning, maintenance, or upgrade cycles. It’s also better for the Earth: our multi-tenant SaaS approach means more efficiency and a lower carbon footprint to deliver those functions.

But what happens with all that hardware you no longer need to maintain after switching to Cloudflare?

The life of a hardware box begins on the factory line at the manufacturer. These are then packaged, shipped and installed at the destination infrastructure where they provide processing power to run front-end products or services, and routing network traffic. Occasionally, if the hardware fails to operate, or its performance declines over time, it will get fixed or will be returned for replacement under the warranty.

When none of these options work, the hardware box is considered end-of-life and it “dies”. This hardware must be decommissioned by being disconnected from the network, and then physically removed from the data center for disposal.

The useful lifespan of hardware depends on the availability of newer generations of processors which help realize critical efficiency improvements around cost, performance, and power. In general, the industry standard of hardware decommissioning timeline is between three and six years after installation. There are additional benefits to refreshing these physical assets at the lower end of the hardware lifespan spectrum, keeping your infrastructure at optimal performance.

In the instance where the hardware still works, but is replaced by newer technologies, it would be such a waste to discard this gear. Instead, there could be recoverable value in this outdated hardware. And simply tossing unwanted hardware into the trash indiscriminately, which will eventually become part of the landfill, causes devastating consequences as these electronic devices contain hazardous materials like lithium, palladium, lead, copper and cobalt or mercury, and those could contaminate the environment. Below, we explain sustainable alternatives and cost-beneficial practices one can pursue to dispose of your infrastructure hardware.

For hardware that still works, the most sustainable route is to sanitize it of data, refurbish, and resell it in the second-hand market at a depreciated cost. Some IT asset disposition firms would also repurpose used hardware to maximize its market value. For example, harvesting components from a device to build part of another product and selling that at a higher price. For working parts that have very little resale value, companies can also consider reusing them to build a spare parts inventory for replacing failed parts later in the data centers.

The benefits of remarket and reuse are many. It helps maximize a hardware’s return of investment by including any reclaimed value at end-of-life stage, offering financial benefits to the business. And it reduces discarded electronics, or e-waste and their harmful efforts on our environment, helping socially responsible organizations build a more sustainable business. Lastly, it provides alternatives to individuals and organizations that cannot afford to buy new IT equipment.

For used hardware that is not able to be remarketed, it is recommended to engage an asset disposition firm to professionally strip it of any valuable and recyclable materials, such as precious metal and plastic, before putting it up for physical destruction. Similar to remarketing, recycling also reduces environmental impact, and cuts down the amount of raw materials needed to manufacture new products.

A key factor in hardware recycling is a secure chain of custody. Meaning, a supplier has the right certification, preferably its own fleet and secure facilities to properly and securely process the equipment.

From a sustainable point of view, this route should only be used as a last resort. When hardware does not operate as it is intended to, and has no remarketed nor recycled value, an asset disposition supplier would remove all the asset tags and information from it in preparation for a physical destruction. Depending on disposal policies, some companies would choose to sanitize and destroy all the data bearing hardware, such as SSD or HDD, for security reasons.

To further maximize recycling value and reduce e-waste, it is recommended to keep security policy up to date on discarded IT equipment and explore the option of reusing working devices after a professional data wiping as much as possible.

At Cloudflare, we follow an industry-standard capital depreciation timeline, which culminates in recycling actions through the engagement of IT asset disposition partners including Iron Mountain. Through these partnerships, besides data bearing hardware which follows the security policy to be sanitized and destroyed, approximately 99% of the rest decommissioned IT equipment from Cloudflare is sold or recycled.

Hardware discomission can be a burden on a business, from operational strain to complex processes, a lack of streamlined execution to the risk of a data breach. Our experience shows that partnering with an established firm like Iron Mountain who is specialized in IT asset disposition would help kick-start one's hardware recycling journey.

Iron Mountain has more than two decades of experience working with Hyperscale technology and data centers. A market leader in decommissioning, data security and remarketing capabilities. It has a wide footprint of facilities to support their customers’ sustainability goals globally.

Today, Iron Mountain has generated more than US$1.5 billion through value recovery and has been continually developing new ways to sell mass volumes of technology for their best use. Other than their end-to-end decommission offering, there are two additional value adding services that Iron Mountain provides to their customers that we find valuable. They offer a quarterly survey report which presents insights in the used market, and a sustainability report that measures the environmental impact based on total hardware processed with their customers.

Get started today with Iron Mountain on your hardware recycling journey and sign up from here. After receiving the completed contact form, Iron Mountain will consult with you on the best solution possible. It has multiple programs to support including revenue share, fair market value, and guaranteed destruction with proper recycling. For example, when it comes to reselling used IT equipment, Iron Mountain would propose an appropriate revenue split, namely how much percentage of sold value will be shared with the customer, based on business needs. Iron Mountain's secure chain of custody with added solutions such as redeployment, equipment retrieval programs, and onsite destruction can ensure it can tailor the solution that works best for your company's security and environmental needs.

And in collaboration with Cloudflare, Iron Mountain offers additional two percent on your revenue share of the remarketed items and a five percent discount on the standard fees for other IT asset disposition services if you are new to Iron Mountain and choose to use these services via the link in this blog.

In July 2021, Cloudflare committed to removing or offsetting the historical emissions associated with powering our network by 2025. Earlier this year, after a comprehensive analysis of our records, we determined that our network has emitted approximately 31,284 metric tons (MTs) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) since our founding.

Today, we are excited to announce our first step toward offsetting our historical emissions by investing in 6,060 MTs’ worth of reforestation carbon offsets as part of the Pacajai Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) Project in the State of Para, Brazil. The offsets were purchased through our partner 3Degress.

Generally, REDD+ projects attempt to create financial value for carbon stored in forests by using market approaches to compensate landowners for not clearing or degrading forests. From 2007 to 2016, approximately 13% of global carbon emissions from anthropogenic sources were the result of land use change, including deforestation and forest degradation. REDD+ projects are considered a low-cost policy mechanism to reduce emissions and promote co-benefits of reducing deforestation, including biodiversity conservation, sustainable management of forests, and conservation of existing carbon stocks. REDD projects were first recognized as part of the 11th Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2005, and REDD+ was further developed into a broad policy initiative and incorporated in Article 5 of the Paris Agreement.

The Pacajai Project is a Verra verified REDD+ project designed to stop deforestation and preserve local ecosystems. Specifically, to implement sustainable forest management and support socioeconomic development of riverine communities in Para, which is located in Northern Brazil near the Amazon River. The goal of the project is to train village families in land use stewardship to protect the rainforest, as well as agroforestry techniques that will help farmers transition to crops with smaller footprints to reduce the need to burn and clear large sections of adjacent forest.

If you follow sustainability initiatives at Cloudflare, including on this blog, you may know that we have also committed to purchasing renewable energy to account for our annual energy consumption. So how do all of these commitments and projects fit together? What is the difference between renewable energy (credits) and carbon offsets? Why did we choose offsets for our historical emissions? Great questions; here is a quick recap.

Last year, Cloudflare announced two sustainability commitments. First we committed to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy. Meaning, each year we will purchase the same amount of zero emissions energy (wind, solar, etc.) as we consume in all of our data centers and facilities around the world. Matching our energy consumption annually with renewable energy purchases ensures that under carbon accounting standards like the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG), Cloudflare's annual net emissions (or "market-based emissions") from purchased electricity will be zero. This is important because it accounts for about 99.9% of Cloudflare's 2021 emissions.

Renewable energy purchases help make sure Cloudflare accounts for its emissions from purchased electricity moving forward; however, it does not address emissions we generated prior to our first renewable energy purchase in 2018 (what we are calling "historical emissions").

To that end, our second commitment was to "remove or offset all of our historical emissions resulting from powering our network by 2025." For this initiative, we purposefully chose to use carbon removals or offsets, like the Pacajai REDD+ Project, rather than more renewable energy purchases (also called renewable energy credits, renewable energy certificates, or RECs).

Renewable energy certificates (RECs) and carbon offsets are both used by organizations to help mitigate their emissions footprint, but they are fundamentally different instruments.

Renewable energy certificates are created by renewable energy generators, like wind and solar farms, and represent a unit (e.g. 1 megawatt-hour) of low or zero emissions energy delivered to a local power grid. Individuals, organizations, and governments are able to purchase those units of energy, and legally claim their environmental benefits, even if the actual power they consume is from the standard electrical grid.

Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Offsets and RECs: What's the Difference?

A carbon offset, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI), is "a unit of carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO2e) that is reduced, avoided, or sequestered." Offsets can include a wide variety of projects, including reforestation, procurement of more efficient cookstoves in developing nations, avoidance of methane from municipal solid waste sites, and purchasing electric and hybrid vehicles for public transportation.

Carbon removals are a type of carbon offsets that involve actual removal of an amount of carbon from the atmosphere. According to WRI, carbon removal projects include "natural strategies like tree restoration and agricultural soil management; high-tech strategies like direct air capture and enhanced mineralization; and hybrid strategies like enhanced root crops, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, and ocean-based carbon removal."

As the climate crisis accelerates, carbon removals are an increasingly important part of global net zero efforts. For example, a recent analysis by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that even with rapid investment in emissions reductions (like increasing renewable energy supply), the United States must remove 2 gigatons of CO2 per year by midcentury to reach net zero.

Source: World Resources Institute, Carbon Removal

RECs, offsets, and removals are all important tools for individuals, organizations, and governments to help lower their emissions footprint, and each has a specific purpose. As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency puts it, "think of offsets and RECs as two tools in your sustainability tool box — like a hammer and a saw." For example, RECs can only be used to account for emissions from an organization's purchased electricity (Scope 2 emissions). Whereas offsets can be used to account for emissions from combustion engines and other direct emissions (Scope 1), purchased electricity (Scope 2), or carbon emitted by others, including supply chain and logistics emissions (Scope 3). In addition, some sustainability initiatives, like the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) Net-Zero Standard, require the use of removals rather than other types of offsets.

We decided on a combination of offsets and removals for two reasons. The first reason is technical and relates to RECs and vintage years. Every REC produced by a renewable generator must include the date and time it was delivered to the local electrical grid. So, for example, RECs associated with renewable energy generation by a wind facility during the 2022 calendar year are considered 2022 vintage. Most green energy or renewable energy standards require organizations to purchase RECs from the same vintage year as the energy they are seeking to offset. Therefore, finding RECs to account for energy used by our network in 2012 or 2013 would be difficult, if not impossible, and purchasing current year RECs would be inconsistent with most standards.

The second reason we chose offsets and removals is that it gives us more flexibility to support different types of projects. As mentioned above, offset projects can be incredibly diverse and can be purchased all over the world. This gives Cloudflare the opportunity to support a variety of carbon reduction, avoidance, and sequestration projects that also contribute to other sustainable development goals like decent work and economic growth, gender equality and reduced inequalities, and life on land and below water.

Once we decided how we planned to offset our historical emissions, we needed to determine how much to offset. Earlier this year our Infrastructure team led a comprehensive review of all historical asset records to create an annual picture of what hardware we deployed, the number of servers, the energy consumption of each model and configuration, and total energy consumption.

We also cross-checked our hardware deployment records with a review of all of our blog posts and other public statements documenting our network growth over the years. It was actually a pretty interesting exercise. Not only to see the cover art from some of our early blogs (our New Jersey data center announcement is a favorite), but more importantly to relive the amazing growth of our network, step by step, from three data centers in 2010 to more than 275 cities in over 100 countries! Pretty cool.

Finally, we converted those annual energy totals to emissions using a global average emissions factor from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Energy (kWh) x Emissions Factor (gCO2e/kWh) = Carbon Emissions (gCO2e)

In total, we estimated that based on total power consumption, our network produced 31,284 MTs of CO2e prior to our first renewable energy purchase in 2018. We are proud to invest in offsets to mitigate the first 6,060 MTs this year; only 25,224 MTs to go.

Now that we have a firm understanding, reporting, and accounting for our current and past Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions — we think it is time to focus on Scope 3.

Cloudflare published its first company-wide emissions inventory in 2020. Since then, we have focused our reporting and mitigating on our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, as required under the GHG Protocol. However, although Scope 3 emissions reporting remains optional, we think it is an increasingly important part of all organizations' responsibility to understand their total carbon footprint.

To that end, earlier this year we started a comprehensive internal assessment of all of our potential Scope 3 emissions sources. Like most things at Cloudflare we are starting with our network. Everything from embodied carbon in the hardware we buy, to shipping and logistics for moving our data center and server equipment around the world, to how we decommission and responsibly dispose of our assets.

Developing processes to quantify those emissions is one of our top objectives for 2023, and we plan to have more information to share soon. Stay tuned!

Working with our partners at One Tree Planted (OTP), Cloudflare was able to support the restoration of 20 hectares of land at Victoria Park in Nova Scotia, Canada. The 130-year-old natural woodland park is located in the heart of Truro, NS, and includes over 3,000 acres of hiking and biking trails through natural gorges, rivers, and waterfalls, as well as an old-growth eastern hemlock forest.

The planting projects added red spruce, black spruce, eastern white pine, eastern larch, northern red oak, sugar maple, yellow birch, and jack pine to two areas of the park. The first area was a section of the park that recently lost a number of old conifers due to insect attacks. The second was an area previously used as a municipal dump, which has since been covered by a clay cap and topsoil.

Our tree commitment began far from the Canadian woodlands. In 2019, we launched an ambitious tool called Bot Fight Mode, which for the first time fought back against bots, targeting scrapers and other automated actors.

Our idea was simple: preoccupy bad bots with nonsense tasks, so they cannot attack real sites. Even better, make these tasks computationally expensive to engage with. This approach is effective, but it forces bad actors to consume more energy and likely emit more greenhouse gasses (GHG). So in addition to launching Bot Fight Mode, we also committed to supporting tree planting projects to account for any potential environmental impact.

As soon as Bot Fight Mode is enabled, it immediately starts challenging bots that visit your site. It is available to all Cloudflare customers for free, regardless of plan.

When Bot Fight Mode identifies a bot, it issues a computationally expensive challenge to exhaust it (also called “tarpitting"). Our aim is to disincentivize attackers, so they have to find a new hobby altogether. When we tarpit a bot, we require a significant amount of compute time that will stall its progress and result in a hefty server bill. Sorry not sorry.

We do this because bots are leeches. They draw resources, slow down sites, and abuse online platforms. They also hack into accounts and steal personal data. Of course, we allowlist a small number of bots that are well-behaved, like Slack and Google. And Bot Fight Mode only acts on traffic from cloud and hosting providers (because that is where bots usually originate from).

Over 550,000 sites use Bot Fight Mode today! We believe this makes it the most widely deployed bot management solution in the world (though this is impossible to validate). Free customers can enable the tool from the dashboard and paid customers can use a special version, known as Super Bot Fight Mode.

Now, the hard part: how can we translate bot challenges into a specific number of trees that should be planted? Fortunately, we can use a series of unit conversions, similar to those we used to calculate Cloudflare’s total GHG emissions.

We started with the following assumptions.

Table 1.

Next, we selected a high-traffic day to model the rate and duration of bot challenges on our network. On May 23, 2021, Bot Fight Mode issued 2,878,622 challenges, which lasted an average of 50 seconds each. In total, bots spent 39,981 hours engaging with our network defenses, or more than four years of challenges in a single day!

We then converted that time value into kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy based on the rate of power consumed by our generic server listed in Table 1 above.

39,981 (hours) x .2 (kWh/hour) = 7,996 (kWh)

Once we knew the total amount of energy consumed by bad bot servers, we used an emissions factor (the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted per unit of energy consumed) to determine total emissions.

7,996 (kwh) x 338.52 (gCO2e/kwh) = 2,706,805 (gCO2e)

If you have made it this far, clearly you like to geek out like we do, so for the sake of completeness, the unit commonly used in emissions calculations is carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), which is a composite unit for all six GHGs listed in the Kyoto Protocol weighted by Global Warming Potential.

The last conversion we needed was from emissions to trees. Our partners at OTP found that a mature tree absorbs roughly 21 kgCO2e per year. Based on our total emissions that translates to roughly 47,000 trees per server, or 840 trees per CPU core. However, in our original post, we also noted that given the time it takes for a newly planted tree to reach maturity, we would multiply our donation by a factor of 25.

In the end, over the first two years of the program, we calculated that we would need approximately 42,000 trees to account for all the individual CPU cores engaged in Bot Fight Mode. For good measure, we rounded up to an even 50,000.

We are proud that most of these trees are already in the ground, and we look forward to providing an update when the final 25,000 are planted.

"Planting trees will benefit species diversity of the existing forest, animal habitat, greening of reclamation areas as well as community recreation areas, and visual benefits along popular hiking/biking trail networks."  - Stephanie Clement, One Tree Planted, Project Manager North America

Reforestation is an important part of protecting healthy ecosystems and promoting biodiversity. Trees and forests are also a fundamental part of helping to slow the growth of global GHG emissions.

However, we recognize there is no single solution to the climate crisis. As part of our mission to help build a better, more sustainable Internet, Cloudflare is investing in renewable energy, tools that help our customers understand and mitigate their own carbon footprints on our network, and projects that will help offset or remove historical emissions associated with powering our network by 2025.

Want to be part of our bots & trees effort? Enable Bot Fight Mode today! It’s available on our free plan and takes only a few seconds. By the time we made our first donation to OTP in 2021, Bot Fight Mode had already spent more than 3,000 years distracting bots. That is enough time to watch Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining more than 10 million times.

Help us defeat bad bots and improve our planet today!

—-For more information on Victoria Park, please visit https://www.victoriaparktruro.caFor more information on One Tree Planted, please visit https://onetreeplanted.orgFor more information on sustainability at Cloudflare, please visit www.cloudflare.com/impact

Over the past few days, as part of Cloudflare’s Impact Week, we’ve written about the work we’re doing to help build a greener Internet. We’re making bold climate commitments for our own network and facilities and introducing new capabilities that help customers understand and reduce their impact. And in addition to organization-level initiatives, we also recognize the importance of individual impact — which is why we’re excited to publicly introduce Greencloud, our sustainability-focused employee working group.

Greencloud is a coalition of Cloudflare employees who are passionate about the environment. Initially founded in 2019, we’re a cross-functional, global team with a few areas of focus:

1. Awareness: Greencloud compiles and shares resources about environmental activism with each other and the broader organization. We believe that collective action — not just conscious consumerism, but also engagement in local policy and community movements — is critical to a more sustainable future, and that the ability to affect change starts with education. We’re also consistently inspired by the great work other folks in tech are doing in this space, and love sharing updates from peers that push us to do better within our own spheres of influence.

2. Support: Our membership includes Cloudflare team members from across the org chart, which enables us to be helpful in supporting multidisciplinary projects led by functional teams within Cloudflare.

3. Advocacy: We recognize the importance of both individual and organization-level action. We continue to challenge ourselves, each other and the broader organization to think about environmental impact in every decision we make as a company.

Our vision is to contribute on every level to addressing the climate crisis and creating a more sustainable future, helping Cloudflare become a clear leader in sustainable practices among tech companies. Moreover, we want to empower our colleagues to make more sustainable decisions in each of our individual lives.

Since launching in 2019, Greencloud has created a space for conversation and idea generation around Cloudflare’s sustainability initiatives, many of which have been implemented across our organization. As a group, we’ve created content to educate ourselves and external audiences about a broad range of sustainability topics:

• Benchmarked Cloudflare’s sustainability practices against peer companies to understand our baseline and source ideas for improvement.

• Curated guides for colleagues on peer-reviewed content, product recommendations, and “low-hanging fruit” actions we all have the ability to take, such as choosing a sustainable 401k investment plan and using a paperless option for all employee documents.

• Hosted events such as sustainability-themed trivia/quiz nights to spark discussion and teach participants techniques for making more sustainable decisions in our own homes and lives.

In addition to creating “evergreen” resources and hosting events, Greencloud threw a special celebration for April 22, 2021 — the 51st global Earth Day. For the surrounding week, we hosted a series of events to engage our employees and community in sustainability education and actions.

You can catch reruns of our Earth Week content on Cloudflare TV, covering a broad range of topics:

Tuesday: InfrastructureA chat with Michael Aylward, Head of Cloudflare's Network Partners Program and renewable energy expert, about the carbon footprint of Internet infrastructure. We explored how the Internet contributes to climate change and what tech companies, including Cloudflare, are doing to minimize this footprint.

Wednesday: PolicyAn interview with Doug Kramer, Cloudflare's General Counsel, and Patrick Day, Cloudflare's Senior Policy Counsel, on the overlap between sustainability, tech, and public policy. We dove into how tech companies, including Cloudflare, are working with policymakers to build a more sustainable future.

Thursday: Cloudflare and the ClimateFrancisco Ponce de León interviewed Sagar Aryal, the CTO of Plant for the Planet, an organization of young Climate Justice Ambassadors with the goal of planting one trillion trees. Plant for the Planet is a participant in Project Galileo, Cloudflare's program providing free protection for at-risk public interest groups.

In addition, Amy Bibeau, our Greencloud Places team lead, interviewed Cloudflare's Head Of Real Estate and Workplace Operations, Caroline Quick and LinkedIn's Dana Jennings, Senior Project Manager, Global Sustainability for a look into the opportunities and challenges around creating sustainable workplaces. Like most companies, Cloudflare is re-thinking what our workplace will look like post-COVID.  Baking sustainability into those plans, and being a model for other companies, can be game changing.

Friday: Personal Impact & TriviaA panel of Greencloud employees addressed the challenge of personal versus collective/system-level action and broke down some of the highest value actions we’re working on taking in our own lives.

Finally, Greencloud took over Cloudflare TV’s signature game show Silicon Valley Squares with Earth Day-themed questions!

No one person, group, or organization working alone can save our planet — the degree of collective action required to reverse climate change is staggering, but we’re excited and inspired by the work that leaders across every industry are pitching in every day. We’d love for you and/or your organization to join us in this calling to create a more sustainable planet and tell us about your initiatives to exchange ideas.

When we started Cloudflare, we weren't thinking about minimizing the environmental impact of the Internet. Frankly, I didn't really think of the Internet as having much of an environmental impact. It was just this magical resource that gave access to information and services from anywhere.

But that was before I started racking servers in hyper-cooled data centers. Before Cloudflare started paying the bills to keep those servers powered up and cooled down. Before we became obsessed with maximizing the number of requests we could process per watt of power. And long before we started buying directly from renewable power suppliers to drive down the cost of electricity across our network.

Today, I have a very good understanding of how much power it takes to run the Internet. It therefore wasn't surprising to read the Boston Consulting Group study which found that 2% of all carbon output, about 1 billion metric tons per year, is attributable to the Internet. That’s the equivalent of the entire aviation industry.

While we didn't set out to reduce the environmental impact of the Internet, Cloudflare has always had efficiency at its core. It comes from our ongoing fight with an old nemesis: the speed of light.

Because we knew we couldn't beat the speed of light, in order to make our network fast we needed to get close to where Internet users were. In order to do that, we needed to partner directly with ISPs around the world so they'd allow us to install our gear directly inside their networks. In order to do that, we needed to make our gear as low power as possible. And we needed to invent network technology to spread load around our network to deal with spikes of traffic — whether because of a cyber attack or a sale on an exclusive new sneaker line — and to efficiently use all available capacity.

When back in December 2012, just two years after we launched, I traveled to Intel's Oregon Research Center to talk to their senior engineering team about how we needed server chips with more cores per watt, I wasn't thinking we needed it to save the environment. Instead, I was trying to figure out how we could build equipment that was power efficient enough that ISPs wouldn't object to installing it. Unfortunately, Intel told me that I was worrying about the wrong thing. So that's when we started looking for alternatives, including the very power-efficient Arm.

But, it turns out, our obsession with efficiency has made Cloudflare the environmental choice in cloud computing. A 2015 study by Anders S. G. Andrae and Tomas Edler estimated the average cost of processing a byte of information online. Even accounting for the efficiency gains across the industry, based on the study’s data our best estimates are that Cloudflare data processing is more than 19 times more efficient.

The imperfect analogy that I like is buying from the local farmers' market versus the big box retailer. By serving requests locally, and not backhauling them around the world to massive data centers, Cloudflare is able to reduce the environmental impact of our customers on the Internet. In 2020, we estimate that our customers reduced their carbon output by 550,000 metric tons versus if they had not used our services. That's the equivalent of eliminating 635 million miles driven by passenger cars last year.

We're proud of that, but it's still a tiny percentage of the overall impact the Internet still has on the environment. As we thought about Impact Week, we set out to make reducing the environmental impact of the Internet a top priority. Given today more than 1 in 6 websites uses Cloudflare, we're in a position where changes we make can have a meaningful impact.

Starting today, we're announcing four major initiatives to reduce Cloudflare's environmental impact and help the Internet as a whole be more environmentally friendly.

First, we're committing to be carbon neutral by 2022. We already extensively use renewable energy to power our global network, but we're going to expand that usage to cover 100% of our energy use. But we're going a step further. We're going to look back over the 11 years since Cloudflare launched and purchase offsets to zero out all of Cloudflare's historical carbon output from powering our global network. It's not enough that we have less impact than others, we want to make sure Cloudflare since our beginning has been a net positive for the planet.

Second, we are ramping up our deployment of a new class of hyper-efficient servers. Based on Arm technology, these servers can perform the same amount of work while using half the energy. We are hopeful that by prioritizing energy efficiency in the server market we can help catalyze more chip manufacturers to release more efficient designs.

Third, we're releasing a new option for Cloudflare Workers and Pages, our computing platform and JAMStack offering, which allows developers to choose to run their workloads in the most energy efficient data centers. We believe we are the first major cloud computing vendor to offer developers a way to optimize for the environment. The Green Workers option won't cost any more. The tradeoff will be that workloads may incur a bit of additional network latency, but we believe for many developers that's a tradeoff they'll be willing to make.

Finally, and maybe most ambitiously, we're working with a number of the leading search and crawl companies to introduce an open standard to minimize the amount of load from excessive crawl as possible. Nearly half of all Internet traffic is automated. The majority of that is malicious, and Cloudflare is designed to stop that as efficiently as possible.

But more than 5% of all Internet traffic is generated by legitimate crawlers which index the web in order to power services we all rely on like search. The problem is, more than half of that legitimate crawl traffic is redundant — reindexing pages that haven't changed. If we can eliminate redundant crawl, it'd be the equivalent of planting a new 30 million acres of forest. That's a goal worth striving for.

When we started Cloudflare we weren't thinking about how we could reduce the Internet's environmental impact. But that's changed. Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet. And a better Internet is clearly a more environmentally friendly Internet.

All too often we are confronted with the choice to move quickly or act responsibly. Whether the topic is safety, security, or in this case sustainability, we’re asked to make the trade off of halting innovation to protect ourselves, our users, or the planet. But what if that didn’t always need to be the case? At Cloudflare, our goal is to bring sustainable computing to you without the need for any additional time, work, or complexity.

Enter Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers.

Green Compute can be enabled for any Cron triggered Workers. The concept is simple: when turned on, we’ll take your compute workload and run it exclusively on parts of our edge network located in facilities powered by renewable energy. Even though all of Cloudflare’s edge network is powered by renewable energy already, some of our data centers are located in third-party facilities that are not 100% powered by renewable energy. Green Compute takes our commitment to sustainability one step further by ensuring that not only our network equipment but also the building facility as a whole are powered by renewable energy. There are absolutely no code changes needed. Now, whether you need to update a leaderboard every five minutes or do DNA sequencing directly on our edge (yes, that’s a real use case!), you can minimize the impact of any scheduled work, regardless of how complex or energy intensive.

Cron triggers allow developers to set time-based invocations for their Workers. These Workers happen on a recurring schedule, as opposed to being triggered by application users via HTTP requests. Developers specify a job schedule in familiar cron syntax either through wrangler or within the Workers Dashboard. To set up a scheduled job, first create a Worker that performs a periodic task, then navigate to the ‘Triggers’ tab to define a Cron Trigger.

The great thing about cron triggered Workers is that there is no human on the other side waiting for a response in real time. There is no end user we need to run the job close to. Instead, these Workers are scheduled to run as (often computationally expensive) background jobs making them a no-brainer candidate to run exclusively on sustainable hardware, even when that hardware isn’t the closest to your user base.

Cloudflare’s massive global network is logically one distributed system with all the parts connected, secured, and trusted. Because our network works as a single system, as opposed to a system with logically isolated regions, we have the flexibility to seamlessly move workloads around the world keeping your impact goals in mind without any additional management complexity for you.

When you set up a Cron Trigger with Green Compute enabled, the Cloudflare network will route all scheduled jobs to green energy hardware automatically, without any application changes needed. To turn on Green Compute today, signup for our beta.

If you haven’t ever had the pleasure of writing a cron job yourself, you might be wondering — what do you use scheduled compute for anyway?

There are a wide range of periodic maintenance tasks necessary to power any application. In my working life, I’ve built a scheduled job that ran every minute to monitor the availability of the system I was responsible for, texting me if any service was unavailable. In another instance, a job ran every five mins, keeping the core database and search feature in sync by pulling all new application data, transforming it, then inserting into a search database. In yet another example, a periodic job ran every half hour to iterate over all user sessions and cleanup sessions that were no longer active.

Scheduled jobs are the backbone of real world systems. Now, with Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers all these real world systems and their computationally expensive background maintenance tasks, can take advantage of running compute exclusively on machines powered by renewable energy.

Our mission at Cloudflare is to help you tackle your sustainability goals. Today, with the launch of the Carbon Impact Report we gave you visibility into your environmental impact. The collaboration with the Green Web Foundation gave green hosting certification for Cloudflare Pages. And our launch of Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers allows you to exclusively run on hardware powered by renewable energy. And the best part? No additional system complexity is required for any of the above.

Cloudflare is focused on making it easy to hit your ambitious goals. We are just getting started.

Cloudflare has millions of free customers. Not only is it something we’re incredibly proud of in the context of helping to build a better Internet — but it’s something that has made the Cloudflare service measurably better. One of the ways we’ve benefited is that it’s created a very strong imperative for Cloudflare to maintain a network that is as efficient as possible. There’s simply no other way to serve so many free customers.

In the spirit of this, we are very excited about the latest step in our energy-efficiency journey: turning to Arm for our server CPUs. It has been a long journey getting here — we first started testing Arm CPUs all the way back in November 2017. It’s only recently, however, that the quantum of energy efficiency improvement from Arm has become clear.  Our first deployment of an Arm-based CPU, designed by Ampere, was earlier this month – July 2021.

Our most recently deployed generation of edge servers, Gen X, used AMD Rome CPUs. Compared with that, the newest Arm based CPUs process an incredible 57% more Internet requests per watt. While AMD has a sequel, Milan (and which Cloudflare will also be deploying), it doesn’t achieve the same degree of energy efficiency that the Arm processor does — managing only 39% more requests per watt than Rome CPUs in our existing fleet. As Arm based CPUs become more widely deployed, and our software is further optimized to take advantage of the Arm architecture, we expect further improvements in the energy efficiency of Arm servers.

Using Arm, Cloudflare can now securely process over ten times as many Internet requests for every watt of power consumed, than we did for servers designed in 2013.

(In the graphic below, for 2021, the perforated data point refers to x86 CPUs, whereas the bold data point refers to Arm CPUs)

As Arm server CPUs demonstrate their performance and become more widely deployed, we hope this will inspire x86 CPUs manufacturers (such as Intel and AMD) to urgently take energy efficiency more seriously. This is especially important since, worldwide, x86 CPUs continue to represent the vast majority of global data center energy consumption.

Together, we can reduce the carbon impact of Internet use. The environment depends on it.

As we announced this week, Cloudflare is helping to create a clean slate for the Internet. Our goal is simple: help build a better, greener Internet with no carbon emissions that is powered by renewable energy.

To help us get there, Cloudflare is making two announcements. The first is that we're committed to powering our network with 100% renewable energy. This builds on work we started back in 2018, and we think is clearly the right thing to do. We also believe it will ultimately lead to more efficient, more sustainable, and potentially cheaper products for our customers.

The second is that by 2025 Cloudflare aims to remove all greenhouse gases emitted as the result of powering our network since our launch in 2010. As we continue to improve the way we track and mitigate our carbon footprint, we want to help the Internet begin with a fresh start.

Finally, as part of our effort to track and mitigate our emissions, we're also releasing our first annual carbon emissions inventory report. The report will provide detail on exactly how we calculate our carbon emissions as well as our renewable energy purchases. Transparency is one of Cloudflare's core values. It's how we work to build trust with our customers in everything we do, and that includes our sustainability efforts.

Understanding Cloudflare's commitment to power its network with 100% renewable energy requires some additional background on renewable energy markets, as well as international emissions accounting standards.

Companies that commit to powering their operations with 100% renewable energy are required to match their total energy used with electricity produced from renewable sources. The international standards that govern these types of commitments such as the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol and ISO 14064, are the same ones used by governments for quantifying their carbon emissions for global climate treaties like the Paris Climate Agreement. There are also additional industry best practices like RE100, which are voluntary guidelines established by companies working to support renewable energy development and eliminate carbon emissions.

Actually purchasing renewable energy consistent with those requirements can be done in several ways — through self-generation, like rooftop solar panels or wind turbines; through contracts with wind or solar farms via Power Purchase Agreements (PPA's) or unbundled Renewable Energy Credits (RECs), or in some cases purchased through local utility companies like CleanPowerSF in San Francisco, CA.

The goal of providing so many options to purchase renewable energy is to leverage as much investment as possible in new renewable sources. As our colleague Jess Bailey described after our first renewable energy purchase in 2018, because of the way electricity flows through electrical grids, it's impossible for the individual consumer to know whether they are using electricity from conventional or renewable sources. However, in order to allow customers of all sizes to invest in renewable energy generally, these standards and accounting systems allow individuals or organizations to track their investments and enjoy the benefits of supporting renewable energy, even if the actual power comes from the standard electrical grid.

According to IEA, in 2020 alone, global renewable energy capacity increased 45 percent, which was the largest annual increase since 1997. In addition, close to 50 percent of corporate renewable energy investment over the last five years has been by Internet Communications Technology (ICT) companies alone.

Cloudflare's new commitment to power its network with renewable energy means that we will continue to match 100 percent of our global energy usage by purchasing energy from renewable sources. Although Cloudflare made its first renewable energy purchase in 2018, and matched its total global operations in both 2019 and 2020, we thought it was important to make a public, forward-looking commitment so that all of our stakeholders, including customers, investors, employees, and suppliers have confidence that we will continue to build our network on renewable energy moving forward.

To determine how much renewable energy to buy, we separate our total electrical usage into two types: network and facilities. For our network, we pull data from all of our servers and networking equipment located all over the world twice a year. For our facilities (or offices), per the GHG Protocol, we record our actual energy usage wherever we have access to utility bills. For offices located in larger buildings with multiple tenants, we use energy usage intensity (EUI) estimates calculated by the U.S. Energy Information Agency.

We also purchase renewable energy in two ways. The vast majority of our purchases are RECs, which we purchase through our partner 3Degrees to help make sure we are aligned with relevant standards like the GHG Protocol. In 2020, to match the usage of our network, Cloudflare purchased RECs, I-RECs, REGOs, and other energy attribute certificates from the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, South Africa, and Turkey among others. Although Cloudflare has employed a regional purchasing strategy in the past, we also expect to be fully aligned with all RE100 criteria, including its market boundary criteria, by the end of 2021.

Cloudflare's goal is to remove or offset all of our historical emissions resulting from powering our network by 2025. To meet that target, Cloudflare must first determine exactly how much carbon was emitted as the result of operating our network from 2010 to 2019, and then invest in carbon offsets or removals to match those emissions.

Determining carbon emissions from purchased electricity is a relatively straightforward calculation. In fact, it's basically just a unit conversion:

Energy (KWH) x Emissions Factor (gC02e/KWH) = Carbon emissions (gC02e)

The key to accurate results is the emissions factors. Emissions factors are essentially measurements of the amount of GHGs emitted from a specific power supplier (e.g. power plant X in San Francisco) per unit of energy created. For our purposes, GHGs are those defined in the 1992 Kyoto Protocol (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulphur hexafluoride). To help ease reporting, the six GHGs are often expressed as a single unit "carbon-dioxide equivalent" or "CO2e", based on each gas’ Global Warming Potential (GWP). Emission factors from individual power sources are often combined and averaged to create grid average emissions factors for cities, regions, or countries. Per the GHG Protocol, Cloudflare uses emissions factors from the U.S. EPA, U.K. DEFRA, and IEA.

For our annual inventory report, which we are also releasing today, Cloudflare calculates carbon emissions scores for every single data center in our network. Cloudflare multiplies the actual energy used by the equipment by the applicable grid average emissions factors in each of the more than 100 countries where we have equipment.

For our historical calculations, we have data on our actual carbon emissions dating back to 2018, which was our first renewable energy purchase. Prior to 2018, we are combing through all of our purchasing, shipping, energy usage, and colocation agreements to reconstruct how much energy we consumed and when. It's actually a pretty cool exercise to go back and watch our network grow. Although we do not have a final calculation to share yet, rest assured we will keep everyone posted, particularly as we get to the fun part of starting to work with organizations and companies working on carbon removal efforts.

Although we're proud of the steps we're taking as a company with renewable energy and carbon emissions, we're just getting started.

Cloudflare is also exploring new products and ideas that can help leverage the power of one of the world's largest networks to drive better climate outcomes for our customers and for the Internet. To see a really cool example, check out our colleagues blog post from earlier today, on Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers, which is helping Cloudflare's intelligent edge route some additional workloads to renewable energy facilities, or our Carbon Impact Reports, which are helping our customers optimize their carbon footprint.

At Cloudflare, we are continuing to expand our sustainability initiatives to build a greener Internet in more than one way. We are seeing a shift in attitudes towards eco-consciousness and have noticed that with all things considered equal, if an option to reduce environmental impact is available, that’s the one widely preferred by our customers. With Pages now Generally Available, we believe we have the power to help our customers reach their sustainability goals. That is why we are excited to partner with the Green Web Foundation as we commit to making sure our Pages infrastructure is powered by 100% renewable energy.

As part of Cloudflare’s Impact Week, Cloudflare is proud to announce its collaboration with the Green Web Foundation (GWF), a not-for-profit organization with the mission of creating an Internet that one day will run on entirely renewable energy. GWF maintains an extensive and globally categorized Green Hosting Directory with over 320 certified hosts in 26 countries! In addition to this directory, the GWF also develops free online tools, APIs and open datasets readily available for companies looking to contribute to its mission.

All websites certified as operating on 100 percent renewable energy by GWF must provide evidence of their energy usage and renewable energy purchases. Cloudflare Pages have already taken care of that step for you, including by sharing our public Carbon Emissions Inventory report. As a result, all Cloudflare Pages are automatically listed on GWF's  public global directory as official green hosts.

If you’re hosting your site on Cloudflare Pages, absolutely nothing.

All existing and new sites created on Pages are automatically certified as “green” too! But don’t just take our word for it. With our partnership with GWF and as a Pages user, you can enter your own pages.dev or custom domain into the Green Web Check to verify your site’s green hosting status. Once the domain is shown as verified, you can display the Green Web Foundation badge on your webpage to showcase your contributions to a more sustainable Internet as a green-hosted site. You can obtain this badge by one of two ways:

1. Saving the badge image directly.

2. Adding the provided snippet of HTML to your existing code.

Cloudflare is committed to helping our customers achieve their sustainability goals through the use of our products. In addition to our initiative with the Green Web Foundation for this year’s Impact Week, we are thrilled to announce the other ways we are building a greener Internet, such as our Carbon Impact Report and Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers.

We can all play a small part in reducing our carbon footprint. Start today by setting up your site with Cloudflare Pages!

"Cloudflare's recent climate disclosures and commitments are encouraging, especially given how much traffic flows through their network. Every provider should be at least this transparent when it comes to accounting for the environmental impact of their services. We see a growing number of users relying on CDNs to host their sites, and they are often confused when their sites no longer show as green, because they’re not using a green CDN. It’s good to see another more sustainable option available to users, and one that is independently verified.” - Chris Adams, Co-director of The Green Web Foundation

Today, as part of Cloudflare’s Impact Week, we’re excited to announce a new tool to help you understand the environmental impact of operating your websites, applications, and networks. Your Carbon Impact Report, available today for all Cloudflare accounts, will outline the carbon savings of operating your Internet properties on Cloudflare’s network.

Everyone has a role to play in reducing carbon impact and reversing climate change. We shared today how we’re approaching this, by committing to power our network with 100% renewable energy. But we’ve also heard from customers that want more visibility into the impact of the tools they use (also referred to as “Scope 3” emissions) — and we want to help!

We’ve previously blogged about how Internet infrastructure affects the environment. At a high level, powering hardware (like servers) uses energy. Depending on its source, producing this energy may involve emitting carbon into the atmosphere, which contributes to climate change.

When you use Cloudflare, we use energy to power hardware to deliver content for you. But how does that energy we use compare to the energy it would take to deliver content without Cloudflare? As of today, you can go to the Cloudflare dashboard to see the (approximate) carbon savings from your usage of Cloudflare services versus Internet averages for your usage volume.

Most of the energy that Cloudflare uses comes from powering the servers at our edge to serve your content. We’ve outlined how we quantify the carbon impact of this energy in our emissions report. To determine the percentage of this impact derived from your Cloudflare usage specifically, we’ve used the following method:

When you use Cloudflare, data from requests destined to your Internet property goes through our edge. Data transfer for your Internet properties roughly represents a fraction of the energy consumed at Cloudflare’s edge. If we sum up the data transfer for your Internet properties and multiply that number by the energy it takes to power each request (derived from our emissions report and overall usage data), we can approximate the total carbon impact of powering your Internet properties with Cloudflare.

We already knew that delivering content takes some energy and therefore has some carbon impact. So how much energy does Cloudflare actually save you? To determine what your usage would look like without Cloudflare, we’ve used the following method:

Using public information on average data center energy usage and the International Energy Agency’s global average emissions for energy usage, we can calculate the carbon cost of data transfer through average (non-Cloudflare) networks. We can then compare these numbers to arrive at your carbon savings from using Cloudflare.

With our new Carbon Impact Report, available for all plans/users, we’ve given you this value for your account. It represents the carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) that you’ve saved as a result of using Cloudflare to serve requests to your Internet properties in 2020.

This raw number is great, but it isn’t the easiest to understand. What does a gram of carbon dioxide equivalent actually mean in practice? It’s not a unit of measurement most of us are used to seeing in our day-to-day lives. To make this number a little easier to digest, we’ve also provided a comparison to light bulbs.

Standard light bulbs are 60 watts, so we know that turning on a light bulb for an hour uses 0.06 kilowatt-hours of energy. According to the EPA, that’s about 42 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent. That means that if your carbon dioxide equivalent saving is 126 grams, that’s approximately the same impact as turning off a light bulb for three hours.

As explained in more detail here, Cloudflare purchases Renewable Energy Credits to account for the energy used by our network. This means that your use of Cloudflare’s services is powered by renewable energy.

Additionally, using Cloudflare helps you reduce your overall carbon footprint. Using Cloudflare’s cloud security and performance services such as WAF, Network Firewall, and DDoS mitigation allow you to decommission specialized hardware and transfer those functions to software running efficiently at our edge. This reduces your carbon footprint by significantly decreasing the energy used to operate your network stack, and improves your security, performance, and reliability along the way.

Optimizing your website also reduces your carbon footprint by requiring less energy for your end users to load a page. Using Cloudflare’s Image Resizing for visual content on your site to properly resize images reduces the energy it takes each of your end users to load a page, thus reducing downstream carbon emissions.

Lastly, since Cloudflare is a certified green host, any content you host on Pages or Workers KV is hosted green and certified powered by renewable energy.

This dashboard is just a first step in giving our customers transparent information on their carbon use, savings, and ideas for improvement with Cloudflare. Right now, you can view data on your carbon savings from 2020 (aligned with our 2020 emissions report). As we continue to iterate on how we measure carbon impact, we’re working toward providing dynamic information on carbon savings at a quarterly or even monthly granularity.

Have other ideas on what we can provide to help you understand and reduce the carbon impact of your Internet properties? Please reach out to us in the comments on this post or on social media!

We hope that this data helps you with your sustainability goals, and we’re excited to keep providing you with transparent information for 2021 and beyond.

Power is the precursor to all modern technology. James Watt’s steam engine energized the factory, Edison and Tesla’s inventions powered street lamps, and now both fossil fuels and renewable resources power the trillions of transistors in computers and phones. In the words of anthropologist Leslie White: “Other things being equal, the degree of cultural development varies directly as the amount of energy per capita per year harnessed and put to work.”

Unfortunately, most of the traditional ways to generate power are simply not sustainable. Burning coal or natural gas releases carbon dioxide which directly leads to global warming, and threatens the habitats of global ecosystems, and by extension humans. If we can’t minimize the impact, our world will be dangerously destabilized -- mass extinctions will grow more likely, and mass famines, draughts, migration, and conflict will only be possible to triage rather than avoid.

Is the Internet the primary source of this grave threat? No: all data centers globally accounted for 2-3% of total global power use in recent years, and power consumption isn’t the only contributor to human carbon emissions. Transportation (mostly oil use in cars, trucks, ships, trains, and airplanes) and industrial processing (steel, chemicals, heavy manufacturing, etc.) also account for similar volumes of carbon emissions. Within power use though, some internet industry analysts estimate that total data center energy (in kilowatt-hours, not percentage of global power consumption) may double every four years for the foreseeable future -- making internet energy use more than just rearranging deck chairs...

How does internet infrastructure like Cloudflare’s contribute to power consumption? Computing power resources are split into end users (like your phone or computer displaying this page) and network infrastructure. That infrastructure likewise splits into “network services” like content delivery and “compute services” like database queries. Cloudflare offers both types of services, and has a sustainability impact in both -- this post describes how we think about it.

The Cloudflare Network has one huge advantage when power is considered. We run a homogeneous network of nearly identical machines around the world, all running the same code on similar hardware. The same servers respond to CDN requests, block massive DDoS attacks, execute customer code in the form of Workers, and even serve DNS requests to 1.1.1.1. When it is necessary to bring more capacity to a problem we are able to do it by adjusting our traffic’s routing through the Internet, not by requiring wasteful levels of capacity overhead in 175 locations around the world. Those factors combine to dramatically reduce the amount of waste, as they mean we don’t have large amounts of hardware sitting idle consuming energy without doing meaningful work. According to one study servers within one public cloud average 4.15% to 16.6% CPU utilization, while Cloudflare’s edge operates significantly higher than that top-end.

One of the functions Cloudflare performs for our customers is caching, where we remember previous responses our customers have given to requests. This allows the edge location closest to the visitor to respond to requests instantly, saving the request a trip through the Internet to the customer’s origin server. This immediately saves energy, as sending data through the Internet requires switches and routers to make decisions which consumes power.

Serving a response from cache is as close to the lowest power requirement you can imagine to serve a web request; we are reading data from memory or disk and immediately returning it. In contrast, when a customer’s origin has to serve a request, there are two additional costs Cloudflare avoids: first, even getting the request to arrive at the origin often requires many hops over the Internet, each requiring CPU cycles and the energy they consume. Second, the request often requires large amounts of code to be executed and even database queries to be run. The savings are so great that we often have customers enable our caching to keep their servers running even when their request volume would overwhelm their capacity; if our caching were disabled they would almost immediately fail. This means we are not only saving CPU cycles on our customer’s origin, we are preventing them from having to buy and run multiple-X more servers with the proportionally greater energy use & environmental impact that entails.

Our breadth on the Internet also means the performance optimizations we are able to perform have a disproportionate impact. When we speed up TLS or fix CPU stalls we are shaving off milliseconds of CPU from requests traveling to 13 million different websites. It would be virtually impossible to get all of these performance improvements integrated into every one of those origins, but with Cloudflare they simply see fewer requests and energy is saved.

The energy efficiency of using a wax or tallow candle to create light is on the order of 0.01%. A modern power plant burning gas to power an LED light bulb is nearly 10% efficient, an improvement of 1,000x. One of the most powerful things we can do to lower energy consumption, therefore, is to give people ways of performing the same work with less energy.

Our connection to this concept lives not just in our network, but in the serverless computing platform we offer atop it, Cloudflare Workers. Many of the conventions that govern how modern servers and services operate descend directly from the mainframe era of computing, where a single large machine would run a single job. Unlike other platforms which are based on that legacy, we don’t sell customers servers, virtual machines, or containers; instead we use a technology called isolates. Isolates represent a lightweight way to run a piece of code which provides much of the same security guarantees with less overhead, allowing many thousands of different customer’s code to be executed on a small number of machines efficiently. A traditional computer system might be just as efficient running a single program, but as our world shifts into serverless computing with thousands of code files running on a single machine, isolates shine.

In a conventional computer system the complex security dance between the operating system and the code being executed by a user can consume as much as 30% of the CPU power used. This has only gotten worse with the recent patches required to prevent speculative execution vulnerabilities. Isolates share a single runtime which can manage the security isolation required to run many thousands of customer scripts, without falling back to the operating system. We are able to simply eliminate much of that 30% overhead, using that capacity to execute useful code instead.

Additionally, by being able to start our isolates using just a few milliseconds of CPU time rather than the hundreds required by conventional processes we are able to dynamically scale rapidly, more efficiently using the hardware we do have. Isolates allow us to spend CPU cycles on only the code customers actually wish to execute, not wasteful overhead. These effects are in fact so dramatic that we have begun to rebuild parts of our own internal infrastructure as isolate-powered Cloudflare Workers in part to save energy for ourselves and our customers.

All that means that the energy we ultimately do use for our operations is only a fraction of what it would otherwise take to accomplish the same tasks.

Last year, we took our first major step toward neutralizing the remaining carbon footprint from our operations by purchasing Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) to match all of our electricity use in North America. This year, we have expanded our scope to include all of our operations around the world.

We currently have 175 data centers in more than 75 countries around the world, as well as 11 offices in San Francisco (our global HQ) London, Singapore, New York, Austin, San Jose, Champaign, Washington, D.C. Beijing, Sydney, and Munich. In order to reduce our carbon footprint, we have purchased RECs to match 100% of the power used in all those data centers and offices around the world as well.

As our colleague Jess Bailey wrote about last year, one REC is created for every Megawatt-hour (MWh) of electricity generated from a renewable power source, like a wind turbine or solar panel. Renewable energy is dispersed into electricity transmission systems similar to how water flows in water distribution systems — each of them is mixed inextricably in its respective “pipes” and it’s not possible to track where any particular electron you use, or drop of water you drink, originally came from. RECs are a way to track the volume (and source) of renewable energy contributed to the grid, and act like a receipt for each MWh contributed.

As we noted last year, this action is an important part of our sustainability plan, joining our efforts to work with data centers that have superior Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), and adding to the waste diversion and energy efficiency efforts we already employ in all of our offices.

When combined with our ability to dramatically reduce the amount of data which has to flow through the Internet and the number of requests which have to reach our customer’s origins we hope to not just be considered neutral, but to have a large-scale and long-term positive effect on the sustainability of the Internet itself.