The cloud – just another one of those things you often hear about but don’t really care about. That is, until it stops working for a few hours and you’re stuck in the supermarket with a cart full of groceries, unable to pay by ATM-card and not carrying any cash. That is what happened to me at Albert Heijn a few weeks ago.
More and more services that are essential to our society operating smoothly are stored in the cloud. It is growing and growing and already responsible for about 2% of our world-wide energy demand. If it doesn’t break down under its own weight, it may eventually become a climate hazard. That is, until Georgios Andreadis came along.
For his master’s thesis, he researched how to bring capacity planning for cloud data centres into the 21st century. As a result, these centres may be able to continue to meet the ever-growing computational demands of businesses, scientists and governments, while increasing their efficiency and environmental sustainability. Next time society doesn’t crumble, that’s what I’ll be grateful for.