Greening the Cloud: Cloud Sustainability through GreenOps (Guest blog from VE3)

Author: Abdul Aala, DevOps intern, VE3

Cloud operations are an essential part of daily operations for most firms. Furthermore, it could make up a sizable portion of the budget for some businesses, so if there is little oversight or discipline, waste and inefficiency could be highly costly for them. It may also lead to IT activities that are inefficient in terms of the environment.   

Sustainability in the cloud is a critical component of a sustainable cloud strategy. It should be adopted across your organization to drive synergies in the cloud journey to eliminate or reduce CO2e emissions from your cloud usage. Most significantly, organizational initiatives, projects and measurements should drive the carbon elimination agenda—avoiding CO2e entering the atmosphere—across your organization’s value chain. 

The sustainable cloud management and FinOps solution offers organizations the capability to access comprehensive data regarding the carbon footprint generated by their IT operations across various cloud platforms. This robust platform facilitates effortless identification of opportunities aimed at reducing emissions, while effectively managing cloud expenses and mitigating environmental impact through informed decision-making processes. 

The objective of GreenOps practice is to offer clear and measurable guidance to cloud users and stakeholders, raising their awareness of carbon intensity. This enables them to make informed decisions that reduce their carbon footprint while enhancing performance and efficiency within the cloud environment. 

The unique elements of GreenOps 

• Reduce your IT carbon emissions 
• Improve corporate sustainability reporting 
• Create organizational awareness on your carbon footprint 
• Reduce wasted cloud resources and optimize your spend 

Challenges to Integrating GreenOps 

Of course, it's always a challenge to pursuing new environmental initiatives. And deciding whether to spend more money on cloud providers that can help them achieve carbon neutrality isn't the only factor keeping businesses from being more sustainable. 

• Cloud environments are intricate and dynamic, comprising various services, providers, and configurations. Managing and optimizing these complex ecosystems to minimize carbon emissions can be challenging. 

• There is a lack of standardized metrics and methodologies for measuring carbon intensity in cloud operations. Without consistent benchmarks, it's difficult for organizations to assess their environmental impact accurately. 
• There is often a trade-off between optimizing performance and minimizing carbon emissions in cloud operations. Balancing these competing priorities while ensuring service reliability and user satisfaction can be challenging. 

For example, according to AWS’s shared responsibility model of cloud sustainability, “AWS is responsible for the sustainability of the cloud, while AWS customers are responsible for sustainability in the cloud.”  And in other words, you are responsible for your actions if you choose to use the most power-hungry, wasteful arrangement. 

Whatever you call it—cloud sustainability, green operations, or simply being conscious of your company's carbon footprint—the industry is beginning to agree that green operations are closely linked to future financial operations. 

FinOps focuses on cloud spend efficiency, however this optimization doesn't always result in benefits to the environment. Thankfully, we are business who wish to give sustainability and Cost Optimization priority while making cloud decisions. 

Our Sustainable Cloud Methodology 

1. Create Visibility: Gather, calculate, estimate and assimilate carbon emission equivalents produced by your cloud usage. 

2. Understand your footprint: Understand and present carbon emission data, split among scopes. to users in a multi-dimensional format. 

3. Optimize your workloads: Define and govern science-based targets using global standards to meet internal and global targets. 

Conclusion 

VE3 can help you make more sustainable IT decisions, giving you an overview of the carbon impact of your workloads, as you progress on your journey, whether you are mature in the cloud or beginning your transformation. Businesses are realising that it is essential to achieve the objective of Net Zero globally. The flexibility of cloud services represents both an opportunity and a real challenge, in terms of budgeting and modelling. Plus, to behave responsibly in the cloud, you need reliable measurements and informed decisions. To know more, explore our innovative digital solutions or contact us directly.