CADRE: Carbon-Aware Data Replication for Geo-Diverse Services

Internet services replicate data to geo-diverse sites around the world, often via consistent hashing. Collectively, these sites span multiple power authorities that independently control carbon emissions at each site. Serving data from a carbon-heavy site increases the service's carbon footprint, but it is hard to place data at sites that will have low emission rates without replicating to too many sites. We present CADRE, a carbon-aware data replication approach. CADRE forecasts emission rates at each site and replicates data to sites that combine together to yield low carbon footprints. It makes replication decisions online, i.e., When data is created, and thus avoids emissions caused by moving data frequently in response to changing emission rates. CADRE uses the multiple-choice secretary algorithm to replicate objects with large footprints to low emission sites. It models carbon footprints for each object using the footprint-replication curve, a graph that maps replication factors to expected carbon footprints. CADRE also achieves availability goals, respects storage capacity limits and balances data across sites. Compared to consistent hashing, our approach reduces carbon footprints by 70%. It also supports and enhances the state-of-the-art green load balancing, reducing the carbon footprint by an additional 21%.