Carbon Aware Cloud: How Do You Reduce the Cloud's Carbon Footprint?

Perhaps this no longer comes as a complete surprise. There is a growing awareness that IT is a not-insignificant contributor to the carbon emissions produced by businesses. But fortunately, there is also good news; there are several smart ways to reduce the footprint of cloud services, collectively known as Carbon Aware Cloud.

What is Carbon Aware Cloud?

Simply put, Carbon Aware Cloud is an approach where you consider and actively address carbon emissions in the cloud environment, with the goal of keeping the carbon footprint as low as possible – without compromising on performance and availability.

You can reduce emissions by programming more efficiently, also called carbon efficient. This is not only more sustainable (and cheaper), but often has a positive effect on the performance of your application.

Within Carbon Aware Cloud, several approaches can be distinguished:

• Spacial shifting is moving workloads to places with lower emissions per kWh generated
• Temporal shifting means delaying consumption until a time when emissions per kWh are lowest
• Demand shaping means adjusting the computing power you use to do your work. For example, think of turning down the video quality of your streaming service, or turning down the loading speed of your application to extend. This is only possible for non-critical workloads that could well be less fancy in the evening, for example (such as office applications outside working hours).

By combining these techniques, you as an organization can continuously adapt to the most sustainable conditions. In addition, these sustainable measures can also bring cost savings: after all, lower emissions mean lower energy consumption and thus lower costs.

Getting started with Carbon Aware Cloud

How do you implement Carbon Aware Cloud in your organization? There are several tools and techniques available to help you with this implementation.

An important first step is to map out your current carbon footprint. For example, you can use the Azure Emissions Impact Dashboard or Cloud Carbon Footprint. These give you insight into the CO2 emissions of your cloud environment and help identify areas for improvement.

The next step is to create a concrete plan for implementing Carbon Aware Cloud strategies. This plan can consist of several components:

• Optimizing code and architecture for efficient resource utilization
• Implementing smart scheduling and autoscaling to align workloads with green energy moments
• Migrating workloads to greener regions or data centers
• Using renewable energy sources, such as solar or wind power

Carbon Aware Cloud in practice: 30% decrease within a year

A mid-sized financial services organization was helped by Info Support to meet their sustainability goals by reducing their digital carbon footprint. This data-driven company had a complex cloud infrastructure, with high performance and availability requirements.

The first step was to map the current carbon footprint and identify the largest sources of emissions. Next, the architecture was optimized for efficient resource utilization and smart scheduling was applied to align workloads with green energy moments.

Then Info Support’s expert team helped critically review the location of data and workloads. By using Spatial Shifting, it was possible to move some of the processes that were not time-sensitive to regions with a surplus of renewable energy.

The result: within a year, the company was able to achieve a significant reduction in CO2 emissions of as much as 30 percent – without having to compromise on performance and availability. The more efficient use of resources even reduced the cost of the cloud infrastructure.

Step by step

Experience shows that a phased approach is often the most effective; start with a pilot project to gain experience and initial quick wins. Use the learnings from this to further hone your strategy and roll it out to other parts of your organization. And don’t forget to include the team in this process; moving to a Carbon Aware Cloud is not only a technical challenge, but also requires a strategic approach and the right guidance.