Learn about the key moments of CloudConf 2022 in Turin. How the Cloud contributes to energy efficiency and sustainability.

After a 2-year absence, CloudConf 2022 returned to the stage at the Torino Lingotto Convention Center on Oct. 11. It was a day of lectures, discussions and networking. But, also, an opportunity to reflect on how the Cloud can help improve the world through energy efficiency and centralized security systems. 

Index

1. CloudConf: are sustainability and Cloud the key to a more efficient future?
   1. Laziness: the pillar of energy efficiency in information technology
   2. Meta: automated content verification
2. Conclusions

Sustainability and cloud: the keys to a more efficient future?

Even in the cloud world, managers and developers, have long realized that environmental resources are not infinite. So energy efficiency plays a key role in preserving them.

At CloudConf, the following participated Francesco Bertani, Associate Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services, who explained theserverless architecture of AWS. This was followed by a demonstration of how the platform's scalability allows for increased uptime while continuously reducing consumption.

By 2025, Amazon counts on achieving 100 percent sustainable energy for all AWS operations. The Menlo Park-based company, claims to be guided by the mantra, "The greenest energy is the energy we don't use." 

Serverless architecture, or a back-end without a physical server belonging to the enterprise, lays the foundation for providing global, always-accessible services that can be continuously optimized.

AWS serverless cloud operation

Source:AWS

Laziness: the pillar of energy efficiency in information technology

Of course, servers will continue to exist but their use can be adjusted to consume less and less over time. One of the pillars of energy efficiency in computing is the use of certain programming languages that are more efficient than others.

Like Rust, the Mozilla team's open-source language, which is 75 times faster in execution than Python. Consequently consuming less energy to perform the same task.

Energy consumption of programming languages

Source: R., Pereira 2017

Besides, language choice and physical optimizations of systems, code writing also plays an important role in cloud energy efficiency. For this reason, much emphasis isgiven:

• To the reuse of execution environments;
• to avoiding unnecessary function calls and function idle times;
• Reduce excessive logging. 

To check the goodness of a cloud application's code, you can use profiling tools such as Amazon CodeGuru Profiler. Which supporting languages such as Java and Python, evaluates the performance of the code pet give you advice on how to improve it(before changing trades). 

In practice, the key is to apply the principle of "laziness" that often returns in computing: programming a system to do more while working less. Laziness will save the world! Okay, I had better keep this one to myself. 

Moving to the Cloud allows companies to save on their owned server infrastructure while maximizing energy efficiency and increasing available computing capacity. This is because calls to services soano centralized (on AWS, Google Cloud or other services) in a nutshell a farm enables.

Meta, automated content verification

In addition to performance and environmental sustainability, Cloud innovation now cannot ignore the security of content and information shared via the Web, being the most valuable asset of the digital age, after cat videos. 

The talk by Alberto Massidda, Production Engineer in Meta (Facebook), shifted the focus to a critically important issue: the need to integrate into Cloud systems automatic mechanisms for verifying multimedia content uploaded by users so that it does not violate human dignity and rights. 

With three billion active users on Meta's platforms, if even 1 percent of them were malicious, it would mean that, every day, 30 million users could upload content of abuse, images and videos that are abusive to people's dignity, terrorism and violence-it would not be enough for Ken Shiro to put an end to this. 

Alberto Massidda, Production Engineer, Meta

Fortunately, the automatic similarity detection systems developed by the Meta team are on top of this, which detected 38 million problematic pieces of content in the first quarter of 2022 alone. The efficiency of these systems is such that only 0.04% of them were actually seen by other users, the rest were deleted without anyone noticing. 

This is possible through various systems that analyze images, creating a digital signature, or fingerprint, which is initially compared to databases (e.g, ThreatExchange), where fingerprints of images previously identified as problematic are contained. 

Automated security systems, however, are constantly evolving: in recent years, Machine Learning technologies are being studied and implemented to understand visual content, even if it is manipulated, something that eluded previous cryptohashing-based verification systems (MD5). 

Meta in 2020 released SimSearchNet++, a proprietary artificial intelligence project that through neural networks interprets the meanings of images even when heavily edited, allowing it to automatically eliminate objectionable content.

Analysis and interpretation of digital content

Conclusions

In conclusion, the Cloud world has revolutionized the Internet, services and possibilities, it is creating solutions, and it is bringing out new problems and challenges, but these can be directed, through good planning, toward improving the digital age. 

What is needed, however, is for all entities that want to grow, from medium-sized businesses to large ones, to embrace this world on the clouds without fear of change, but with the understanding that what we do online has a much greater impact on the real world than we can imagine.