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Understanding, reporting and reducing carbon emissions is about to get a whole lot easier for Google Cloud customers thanks to the release of a new portfolio of intelligent tools called Active Assist.

Last year the search giant analyzed aggregate data from all of its cloud customers to find over over 600,000 gross kgCO2e in idle projects that could be cleaned up or reclaimed. In fact, doing so would have a similar impact to planting almost 10,000 trees.

To make it easier for Google Cloud customers to identify if any of these idle workloads are theirs, the company is rolling out Active Assist sustainability recommendations. Under the Active Assist portfolio, there are a number of products and tools like Policy Intelligence, Network Intelligence Center, Predictive Autoscaler and a collection of recommendations for a number of Google Cloud services.

An organization's cloud infrastructure can often be a large part of its overall environmental footprint so switching to Google Cloud can help reduce it. This is because Google has matched all of the energy used by its datacenters with 100 percent renewable energy and the company is committed to running its operations on carbon-free energy 24/7 by 2030.

Active Assist sustainability recommendations

Active Assist Unattended Project Recommender makes it possible for organizations to estimate the gross carbon emissions that can be saved by removing idle projects. The tool uses machine learning to identify which projects are idle and most likely unattended.

At the same time, the data points surfaced by Active Assist now include the carbonFootprintDailyKgCO2 field which allows businesses to estimate the carbon emissions associated with any given project. These recommendations can also estimate the impact of removing an idle project in terms of kilograms of CO2 reduced per month according to a new blog post.

Reporting your carbon emissions and reducing them is also now easier thanks to Google Cloud's Carbon Sense Suite. Active Assist joins the company's Carbon Footprint product which provides organizations with the ability to understand and measure the gross carbon emissions of their Google Cloud usage. Meanwhile low-carbon signals helps users choose cleaner regions to run their workloads from.

To get started with Active Assist sustainability recommendations, organizations running Google Cloud can check out the Carbon Footprint dashboard and the new Recommendation Hub to review projects that may be idle and assess the carbon emissions associated with them.

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