Making The Most Of Sustainable Cloud Computing On AWS
How you can make a difference by being aware and using sustainable resources in the AWS cloud.
Imagine a startup in Silicon Valley that is rapidly growing and expanding its customer base around the world.
The company’s flagship software is hosted on their powerful data centers allowing it to scale as user traffic grows.
But soon they realize that their infrastructure costs are skyrocketing and with it, their energy consumption. They realize that every server they spin up to handle the increasing load contributes to a larger carbon footprint.
The impact becomes overwhelming and the startup soon turns towards AWS to balance growth and sustainable practices.
This story happens quite often.
The good news is that AWS provides a wide array of cloud resources that are tuned to maximize sustainability and reduce our carbon footprint.
What’s more is that AWS empowers businesses to not only reduce waste and provide sustainable resources but they also offer you everything you need to scale and grow that business with the cloud.
The Importance Of Sustainability In The Cloud
The move to the cloud opened up a lot of possibilities — companies no longer need to buy clunky servers and host them on premises.
Instead of companies using on-premise resources at partial capacity, you now have many companies sharing those resources over the cloud.
Potentially using less hardware collectively, less electricity to power-up and cool those data centers and therefore having less impact on the planet.
But, out of sight, out of mind.
When instead of IT scrambling to increase hardware capacity or to routinely cleanup data that’s accumulating to free up storage; you now have that at a click of a button with cloud providers.
Or better yet you can configure auto scale-up and they’ll do it without you even knowing.
While some AWS services are costly and you’ll want to monitor your usage to reduce costs, some still have minimal budget impact (especially at large companies), and cleaning up unused artifacts is rare.
With renewable energy being increasingly adopted throughout the power grid, it’s not that easy to quantify the impact the different services you provision on the cloud have.
And what you can’t measure, you can’t improve.
AWS has a Customer Carbon Footprint tool, but it’s still very nascent and it’s only at the overall monthly level or higher compared to the Billing and Cost Management tools where you can slice and dice daily and by service.
AWS’s Environmental Mission For 2025 & 2040
AWS has set in its sights a quite ambitious goal:
[We] aim to reach net-zero carbon emissions across our operations by 2040 by investing in carbon-free energy, scaling solutions, and collaborating with partners to broaden our impact.[2]
AWS aims to power 100% of its operations with renewable energy by 2025, five years ahead of its original target 2030.
The cloud computing company is also focused on improving the energy efficiency of its data centers.
Research shows that AWS’s infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the average U.S. enterprise data center and up to 5 times more energy efficient than the average in Europe. [3]
Helping Customers Become Sustainable
Additionally, AWS is working to help its customers reduce their own environmental impact.
AWS provides tools and services designed to help businesses become more sustainable in the cloud.
This includes migration evaluators and solutions architects who work with customers to calculate the total cost savings and carbon reduction potential of moving their infrastructure to the cloud.
AWS is also investing in custom chip sets like the Graviton3 CPU and Inferentia accelerator, which significantly reduce energy consumption for computing and AI model training. [3]
The Graviton3 CPU uses up to 60% less energy for the same performance than comparable instances. — Hilary Tam, Principal BDM, Sustainability Innovation & Transformation at AWS [3]
Through these initiatives, AWS is not only innovating and pushing sustainability practices but is also empowering its customers to build more sustainable digital infrastructures.
How You Can Make A Difference
Start by being aware.
Understand how your usage impacts the planet.
Then learn how some small changes can go a long way.
Here are some AWS-related tips:
1. Use Amazon CodeGuru Profiler to identify areas of code that consume the most time or resources and optimize.
2. Use a CloudFront distribution for your static and dynamic web content, such as .html, .css, .js, and image files. It helps minimize latency through storing frequently read static data closer to consumers and helps reduce the network traffic and server load.
3. Pick the right AWS region to deploy to. I wish there was a tool on AWS that would quickly guide you through selecting the right region based on sustainability. Unfortunately, there isn’t (yet). Here are some factors to consider:
Proximity to your customers — choosing a region close to your customers can help reduce latency and potentially lower energy usage from data transmission.
Renewable Energy Usage — some regions are located in locations that are powered by a higher percentage of renewable energy than others. You can use this live map to try and identify green regions.
4. Use spot instances instead of reserved instances where possible to take advantage of unused capacity in the cloud.
5. ML Load — its no secret that the most resource-intense IT usage right now is in training and running ML models. To reduce your impact, while enjoying the amazing opportunities AI/ML bring:
Use smaller, more efficient models when possible
Consider GPU instances for training and CPU instances for inference when appropriate
Leverage AWS SageMaker, which can help optimize resource usage
Conclusion
AWS offers businesses a way to balance growth and sustainability by providing cloud resources that help reduce carbon footprints.
With its goal to power 100% of operations with renewable energy by 2025, AWS is committed to building more energy-efficient data centers and offering tools and services to help its customers become more sustainable in the cloud.
By adopting AWS services, companies can not only grow and scale efficiently but also make more sustainable choices in their infrastructure and operations.
This story was co-authored with Irete Hamdani. Please follow Irete as well if you enjoyed the article.
👋 My name is Uriel Bitton and I’m committed to helping you master Serverless, Cloud Computing, and AWS.
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Thanks for reading and see you in the next one!