![](https://cdn.qwiklabs.com/assets/labs/start_lab-f45aca49782d4033c3ff688160387ac98c66941d.png)
Before you begin
- Labs create a Google Cloud project and resources for a fixed time
- Labs have a time limit and no pause feature. If you restart it, you'll have to start from the beginning.
- On the top left of your screen, click Start lab to begin
Export the carbon footprint data
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In this lab, you will learn why Google Cloud is the cleanest cloud in the industry by exploring and utilizing sustainability tools.
In this lab, you learn how to perform the following tasks:
Read these instructions. Labs are timed and you cannot pause them. The timer, which starts when you click Start Lab, shows how long Google Cloud resources are made available to you.
This hands-on lab lets you do the lab activities in a real cloud environment, not in a simulation or demo environment. It does so by giving you new, temporary credentials you use to sign in and access Google Cloud for the duration of the lab.
To complete this lab, you need:
Click the Start Lab button. If you need to pay for the lab, a dialog opens for you to select your payment method. On the left is the Lab Details pane with the following:
Click Open Google Cloud console (or right-click and select Open Link in Incognito Window if you are running the Chrome browser).
The lab spins up resources, and then opens another tab that shows the Sign in page.
Tip: Arrange the tabs in separate windows, side-by-side.
If necessary, copy the Username below and paste it into the Sign in dialog.
You can also find the Username in the Lab Details pane.
Click Next.
Copy the Password below and paste it into the Welcome dialog.
You can also find the Password in the Lab Details pane.
Click Next.
Click through the subsequent pages:
After a few moments, the Google Cloud console opens in this tab.
Google is carbon neutral today, but aiming higher: our goal is to run on carbon-free energy, 24/7, at all of our data centers by 2030. Plus, we’re sharing technology, methods, and funding to enable organizations around the world to transition to more carbon-free and sustainable systems.
We've built a collection of tools to help you accurately report the carbon emissions associated with your Google Cloud usage and take action to reduce your carbon footprint. The Carbon Sense suite brings together features from multiple Google Cloud products, like Active Assist and Carbon Footprint, to help users everywhere make progress towards ensuring a healthier planet.
There are three key categories of carbon emissions associated with running workloads in the cloud:
Carbon-free energy includes wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, nuclear, hydropower, and pumped storage or battery storage discharge. For each region Google Cloud operates in, we measure the percentage of carbon free energy (CFE%) consumed in a particular location on an hourly basis.
As a customer, the regional CFE score represents the average percentage of time your applications deployed in that cloud region will be running on carbon-free energy.
To lower your carbon emissions, you need to reduce the electricity consumption of your cloud workloads from carbon-based sources. To lower your carbon emissions, we recommend the following primary strategies:
Note: If the Configure Export button is disabled:
carbon_footprint_export
.Data backfills will be created for the selected range, exporting historical monthly data to the destination dataset.
Once the transfer is complete, you can view and query the data in BigQuery.
Click Check my progress to verify the objective.
To reduce your overall emissions, we recommend that you choose regions with higher CFE% where possible. To help you pick cleaner regions, Google Cloud includes a Low CO2 indicator on some of the location selectors of the Cloud Console and the "Locations" pages of the Google Cloud documentation. Learn more about the criteria that a region must meet in order to receive this indicator from Carbon free energy for Google Cloud regions.
Using the Cloud Region picker, select your current location and select a region based on carbon footprint, cost, and latency:
You might observe that cost optimization practices that reduce idle (or inefficient use of) cloud resources also translate well to carbon footprint reduction. Idle resources create wastage by incurring unnecessary costs and emissions. Minimizing idle cloud resources can significantly improve your cloud sustainability.
Active Assist is a portfolio of intelligent tools that helps you optimize your cloud operations with recommendations to reduce costs, increase performance, improve security, and even help you make more sustainable decisions.
Unattended project recommender analyzes usage activity across all projects in your organization and provides you with the following features to help you discover, reclaim, and shut down unattended projects.
Shutting down or reclaiming unattended projects can provide the following impact and benefits to your organization:
You can view unattended project recommendations using gcloud commands or the api. Because lab projects are created on-the-fly at lab launch, there are no unattended projects in this lab to view. Refer to unattended project recommender documentation for more details.
In this lab, you explored and exported Carbon Footprint Data, explored the Cloud Region Picker, and reduced your cloud carbon footprint with Active Assist recommendations.
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Manual Last Updated November 5, 2024
Lab Last Tested November 5, 2024
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