Right. I work in a position where I am somewhat responsible for decisions such as whether to use AWS or not, which at other companies has been a different decision such as what hardware to purchase and where to install it.
This is a difficult situation to balance, because what you are suggesting, from my perspective, ends up being about saying, "I will quit working here unless we quit using Vendor X!" - that will end predictably, and I have lost that fight over GoDaddy as well. At the end of a day of following such a philosophy, I have no job, the Evil Vendor(tm) still gets their money, and I have to explain to people at Next Potential Job(tm) why I don't seem to be a team player.
That said, these are important fights to fight at some level. When I was dealing with hardware, I found many of our decisions frustrating. I found it frustrating that we cared about the USD$ cost of power, and not the environmental cost of it. I found it frustrating that we turned off almost all power saving features of our hardware because they don't deliver as one would hope and tend to harm the workload in a way that may actually require more gear which is expensive, has a carbon cost to manufacture, and has a carbon cost to operate and cool. Guess what? a 2U Rackmount server that sometimes runs at 1.5Ghz for a few seconds instead of running at 2.8GHz all of the time doesn't have a significant impact on the cooling bill, and it can reasonably be expected that your cooling power budget will be roughly equal to your equipment power budget, probably higher because of infrastructure overhead.
It is difficult to find a framework in which to push these decisions because the day to day business does not center around them.
The solution is for decision makers to make them a priority, just like worker safety and other things which don't obviously contribute to the short-term bottom line. I can't spend all of my time advocating up for socially responsible decisions.
Also, Amazon may be in a difficult place wrt other contracts with the government, they may have gotten themselves somewhat entangled. Dropbox does not need Condoleeza Rice on its' board, and it's hard to envision what value she will have other than internally advocating for cooperation with the government and its' defense armature.
I mean, I use EC2 and see nothing wrong with it. I'm just pointing out the double standard of making a big fuss when what you're fussing about is probably a waste of energy and what you're not fussing about would be much more effective if you DID fuss about it.
This is a difficult situation to balance, because what you are suggesting, from my perspective, ends up being about saying, "I will quit working here unless we quit using Vendor X!" - that will end predictably, and I have lost that fight over GoDaddy as well. At the end of a day of following such a philosophy, I have no job, the Evil Vendor(tm) still gets their money, and I have to explain to people at Next Potential Job(tm) why I don't seem to be a team player.
That said, these are important fights to fight at some level. When I was dealing with hardware, I found many of our decisions frustrating. I found it frustrating that we cared about the USD$ cost of power, and not the environmental cost of it. I found it frustrating that we turned off almost all power saving features of our hardware because they don't deliver as one would hope and tend to harm the workload in a way that may actually require more gear which is expensive, has a carbon cost to manufacture, and has a carbon cost to operate and cool. Guess what? a 2U Rackmount server that sometimes runs at 1.5Ghz for a few seconds instead of running at 2.8GHz all of the time doesn't have a significant impact on the cooling bill, and it can reasonably be expected that your cooling power budget will be roughly equal to your equipment power budget, probably higher because of infrastructure overhead.
It is difficult to find a framework in which to push these decisions because the day to day business does not center around them.
The solution is for decision makers to make them a priority, just like worker safety and other things which don't obviously contribute to the short-term bottom line. I can't spend all of my time advocating up for socially responsible decisions.
Also, Amazon may be in a difficult place wrt other contracts with the government, they may have gotten themselves somewhat entangled. Dropbox does not need Condoleeza Rice on its' board, and it's hard to envision what value she will have other than internally advocating for cooperation with the government and its' defense armature.
That is what she does.