Azure data centre Wieringermeer turns out to be much thirstier than thought

The “air-cooled” Azure data centre in Wieringermeer, the Netherlands (Azure region “West Europe”) absorbed a whopping 84 million litres of drinking water last year. That is much more than Microsoft’s stated consumption of 12 to 20 million litres in June last year.

Eighty-four million litres of water is the equivalent of 33 Olympic swimming pools. Microsoft states that drinking water is only used when the outside temperature is over 25 degrees Celcius. A higher temperature was achieved only six days last year. The extreme drinking water usage suggests that water was almost constantly used irrespective of the outside temperature.

Commercially Azure has been an enormous success. Azure sales and market share have steadily increased in the last couple of years. On the non-commercial side, however, dark clouds (pun intended) hang over Microsoft’s Cloud platform.

Next to the environmental impact, six critical security vulnerabilities hit Azure last year. A Critical Vulnerability is where an exploit or proof-of-concept code is publicly available or actively exploited. These six vulnerabilities were described and investigated by Scott Piper, a cloud security specialist and former consultant who’s compiled a lengthy list of the issues on GitHub. The list details vulnerabilities for all the Hyper Clouds: Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon’s AWS and Google’s GCP.

Azure services have had six “critical” vulnerabilities discovered since last summer, compared to two on Amazon’s cloud platform and none on Google Cloud, Piper’s tally shows.

What does not help at Microsoft: capacity management and product management have been more ‘demand driven’ than product-driven. Demand-driven capacity management means that a sudden surge in demand would always stress the data centres to provide capacity the centres simply do not have.

It looks like Microsoft is suffering from their stellar growth. Azure struggles to deliver on the service level and security. In addition, Azure’s environmental impact is much higher than under which Microsoft was licensed to operate by the local government. Promising that you are air-cooled and only need 12-20M litres of drinkable water then go and consume 84 million litres sounds not entirely fair and may conflict with their permit. What’s also peculiar: according to the Dutch Datacenter Association, all DCs in the Netherlands combined consume less than 1M litre of drinking water.

Spark innovation in your organisation within the safe boundaries of our Cloud Landing Zone. Through the Landing Zone, you can implement robust operating models that ensure applications are moved to the cloud within controlled parameters. By using a standardised transformation approach, we make sure that you adopt AWS and Google Cloud in a way that is perfectly aligned with your business objectives. As part of Amazon’s mission to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, we are committed to building a sustainable business for our employees, customers, and communities. Google is carbon neutral today, but aiming higher: our goal is to run on carbon-free energy, 24/7, at all of our data centres by 2030.

At ZEN Software, we are confident we can assist you in accelerating your cloud ambitions; we are Google Cloud Partner and develop our solutions in AWS and GCP.