Cloudflare updated its environmental sustainability targets including commitments to be carbon neutral by 2022 and eliminate its legacy footprint by 2025. The content delivery network provider also announced improved servers with higher energy efficiency and various B2B programs to help its customers achieve their sustainability goals. 

Reliance on renewable energy is a realistic-yet-challenging goal. The span of Cloudflare’s network, which supports 25 million internet properties, remains a barrier to relying only on sustainable power sources, Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming told SDxCentral in an interview.

“We're 100% renewable: that's our commitment. But we are in 200 cities worldwide where we have hardware, and not all the data centers themselves use 100% renewable power,” Graham-Cumming explained. Despite challenges, he expects his company to meet this commitment on schedule. 

Cloudflare also plans to eliminate its legacy footprint by 2025 — an emissions sum that dates back to 2010. But Graham-Cumming hopes Cloudflare will achieve this “well before” the planned date. 

There is no way to truly alter past emissions, but it is possible to offset them. “We want to make sure Cloudflare since our beginning has been a net positive for the planet,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a blog post.

The biggest obstacle Cloudflare will face in its legacy footprint battle is the “accounting exercise” of determining exactly how much carbon it needs to offset.  “No one has the list of how many flights our staff took [or other emissions records], so we have to go back and try and figure out what is the honest assessment of [emissions],” Graham-Cumming said.

In addition, Cloudflare is improving the efficiency of its edge servers by integrating Arm CPUs. These edge servers are designed to deliver 57% more performance per watt, a move Cloudflare hopes will ignite a focus on energy efficiency in the server market.

Cloudflare is working with various search engines like DuckDuckGo, Yandex, and Wayback Machine to eliminate redundant crawl, which is another surprising source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. 

Search engines are designed to always be up-to-date with the latest information. To accomplish this, search engines repeatedly check websites for updated information, resulting in redundant crawl.

“About half the time, checking something that hasn't changed, so it's useless. It's a waste of energy,” Graham-Cumming said. To combat this inefficiency, Cloudflare introduced an open standard to minimize the amount of load from redundant and excessive crawl.

Rather than search engines checking for updates on a repetitive basis, Cloudflare notifies search engines of information updates so the search engine can avoid spending energy on redundant crawl. 

Cloudflare also offers a feature called Green Compute where its customers can choose the data center in which their computation happens to ensure they’re using 100% renewable energy, Graham-Cumming said. 

In addition, Cloudflare customers can display a renewable energy badge on websites powered by Cloudflare Pages to show that site is verified by the Green Web Foundation as reliant on renewable energy.

While the climate crisis persists, consumer and investor demand continues pushing cloud infrastructure providers to operate as sustainably as possible. Although individual action is often upheld as a way to mitigate climate change, Graham-Cumming acknowledged that individuals reducing their internet traffic isn’t a realistic solution to broader environmental issues. 

“So it's up to us, to the large networks, to make this change,” Graham-Cumming said. “We want to be good citizens, and we've reached a scale where if we do something it makes a significant difference.”