Ambra Spectrum Methodology¶
Ambra Spectrum measures greenhouse gas emissions from cloud infrastructure usage. This documentation explains how emissions estimates are produced, what data sources underpin them, and how they align with sustainability reporting standards.
What Ambra Spectrum measures¶
Ambra Spectrum estimates operational carbon emissions (Scope 3, Category 1 under the GHG Protocol) from cloud compute, storage, database, AI/ML, and serverless workloads.
Estimates are derived from real utilisation data collected from cloud provider monitoring APIs, not from billing proxies or spend-based approximations. Energy consumption is converted to CO₂e using the Nodera Carbon Intensity API, which provides hourly, cloud-region-level intensity values based on grid physics.
How it works¶
Cloud Monitoring APIs → Raw metrics → Energy model → CO₂e estimate
- Collect: Real-time metrics (CPU utilisation, storage volume, invocation counts) are fetched from cloud provider monitoring APIs at sub-hourly granularity.
- Compute: Energy consumption is calculated using peer-reviewed models calibrated to specific hardware architectures, then multiplied by datacenter overhead (PUE) and Nodera's hourly grid carbon intensity.
- Serve: Pre-computed estimates with full provenance (data source, intensity source, PUE applied, granularity) are served via the Ambra Spectrum API.
Key differentiators¶
| Ambra Spectrum | Typical alternatives | |
|---|---|---|
| Utilisation data | Real CPU/GPU metrics from cloud monitoring | Assumed averages (often 50%) |
| Granularity | Sub-hourly (5-minute for most services) | Daily or monthly |
| Carbon intensity | Hourly, location-based grid intensity | Annual country averages either location-based or market-based (detached from grid physics) |
| Hardware coefficients | Per-instance-family from SPECpower benchmarks | Single fleet average |
| Provenance | Every estimate includes its data source, intensity source, and PUE | Aggregate totals only |
Documentation structure¶
- Approach: Carbon intensity sources and methodology
- Coverage: Supported cloud services across AWS and GCP
- API: Authentication, endpoints, query parameters, and example requests
Current coverage
Ambra Spectrum currently provides coverage for AWS and GCP.