Spatio-Temporal Shifting to Reduce Carbon, Water, and Land-Use Footprints of Cloud Workloads

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the potential of spatial and temporal cloud workload shifting to reduce carbon, water, and land-use footprints. Specifically, we perform a simulation study using real-world data from multiple cloud providers (AWS and Azure) and workload traces for different applications (big data analytics and FaaS). Our simulation results indicate that spatial shifting can substantially lower carbon, water, and land use footprints, with observed reductions ranging from 20% to 85%, depending on the scenario and optimization criteria. Temporal shifting also decreases the footprint, though to a lesser extent. When applied together, the two strategies yield the greatest overall reduction, driven mainly by spatial shifting with temporal adjustments providing an additional, incremental benefit. Sensitivity analysis demonstrates that such shifting is robust to prediction errors in grid mix data and to variations across different seasons.