Different tools already exist from major cloud providers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to calculate the carbon footprint of their customers' cloud usage, but none quite measure up to the impact and functionality of Thoughtworks' open source Cloud Carbon Footprint (CCF) tool, the software consultancy's North American Head of Cleantech and Sustainability Lisa McNally told SDxCentral.

"I think using the AWS, Google, and Azure tool is great. It's fantastic. Those tools are needed by the consumers of these cloud providers' services, but the CCF tool is just kind of taking it, I think, one step further," she said.

Her team built its cloud carbon footprint tool in an open source way because they wanted to rely on both the experts out in the community and those internally to "build out something that was really a differentiator ... beyond what was already existing in the marketplace," she explained.

"Green cloud optimization is a newer area, and we felt like for us to be able to offer our clients something that really helped solve various solutions," it needed to be open source.

Thoughtworks says its cleantech team and its CCF tool brings added value for clients migrating from legacy infrastructure to the cloud. Alongside cloud cost optimization, "we are also bringing in this insight around carbon visualization, assessment, and really providing strategic recommendations for them to take action," McNally said, adding that environmental sustainability is "a foundational element" of the technology solutions the company develops.

"If we're already working with our clients and helping them optimize around costs and really build out their infrastructure," the firm might as well help them optimize operations from a resource consumption perspective, too, McNally noted. "That was really the genesis of the cloud carbon footprint tool," she said.

Because Thoughtworks' CCF tool is open source, anyone can make contributions or view the tool's methodology, which is not an option for those vendor-specific tools. "It's open source. That does not exist right now," McNally said.

The CCF tool is also compatible with multi-cloud environments, which immediately renders the tool's scale of impact much wider than the cloud giants'.

"You have one dashboard, and you can see the emissions and costs all in one place across different cloud providers. Right now the tool is set up for Google, Azure, and AWS, but it's highly configurable, meaning that if you wanted to build it out for Oracle or a private cloud, you could do that," she explained.

The tool also provides forecasts and associated recommendations to optimize efficiency. "You can see what those savings would be over the course of a month, over the course of several months, and then you can follow the specific recommendations and then have those be tracked and reduced over time," McNally explained.

A major differentiator she noted between her company's CCF tool and other options on the market is its faster data update cadence.

The CCF tool works by pooling usage data from clients' billing information from public cloud providers with an API. A dashboard shows information on cloud cost and carbon emissions on a per-account basis with updates as soon as the service provider updates clients' billing data, McNally explained.

"If you're using, for instance, the Google tool, you may have to wait several months for Google to do the analysis of data, and then they send that to their customer. ... But you can get information on a faster cadence because you're using the billing data," she said.

Regularly updated data also helps support meaningful action without a three-month lag between data recording and availability muddying up what events organizations' actions are actually responding to. "That's one of the key differentiators," McNally noted.

In terms of emissions categorization, purchasing cloud services falls within most organizations' scope 3 emissions, which are the often the most difficult to measure and reduce. Thoughtworks' tool "gives you transparency into one of those categories under scope 3, and it allows you to make comparisons and look at your emissions across different cloud providers," according to McNally.

This is another significant differentiator because "if you're using an individual vendor's tool, you can't really make apples to apples comparisons because you don't know the methodologies that the AWS tool is using versus the Google tool," she explained.

"This CCF tool is really helpful because you know there's one methodology, and it's doing the estimates for all of your cloud usage," she said, adding that the CCF methodology has been verified by PwC.

"Being able to verify the methodology and bring that transparency is really important for not only clients who are wanting to manage their costs and reduce their emissions, but also to help them understand what it is that they might be reporting out on," McNally explained.

Thoughtworks' open source CCF tool has been in the works for about two and a half years, and McNally said her team has partnered with large tech companies including Google, AWS, and Microsoft on the tool's development.

"We actually had the tool in place before AWS and Google announced theirs, but we were aware of [their efforts] and they were aware of us developing this methodology, because ... our intent is not to compete with them," she explained. "The intent is to work with them, get their feedback, and leverage those insights."

And if a client wants to only work with AWS' tool, for example, Thoughtworks can still provide advice based on those insights because the CCF tool isn't what Thoughtworks is selling, it's the advisory services.

"We like, of course, our tool because we can also share the methodology and talk through and make refinements to the tool and really customize it for the customer, whereas we don't get that same access to the AWS tool," McNally said.

Overall she sees sustainability as an emerging field, meaning everyone is kind of in it together at this point. "The ethos and the philosophy of the team and ThoughtWorks is collaboration is always better, which I think is a direct throughput to the open source elements of the tool," she explained.