GreenOps through FinOps: How to kick-start your cloud sustainability journey with work you've already done (Guest blog from Greenpixie)

Author: James Hall, Head of GreenOps, Greenpixie

Your organisation may be further along with GreenOps than you think. With the right cloud emissions measurement methodology, your team can see how far their FinOps work has already taken your business towards sustainable cloud architecture. Then, using the momentum from those successes, the data can highlight where to keep improving.

GreenOps means maximising the value of your cloud provisions for sustainability as well as typical considerations like performance, security, and cost.

For example, as well as asking ‘what’s the financial impact of scheduling workloads’, the GreenOps mindset also asks, ‘what is the sustainability impact of this decision?’ With the right data, a team practicing GreenOps can then make their cloud purchasing decisions with both cost and carbon in mind.

What is the need for GreenOps?

GreenOps means maximising the value of your cloud provisions for sustainability as well as typical considerations like performance, security, and cost.

Cloud computing is an ever-expanding industry. According to Precedence Research, the global cloud computing market will surpass $1 trillion by 2028. Many see the cloud as the new backbone of the IT industry, which itself is expected to contribute over 8% of global GHG emissions by 2025. So the need for Green IT, and specifically Cloud GreenOps, is a simple one: to ensure we manage this growth as sustainably as possible.

And currently, we’re not.

32% of cloud budget is estimated to be wasted. And while we can’t use cloud cost as a direct proxy for cloud emissions (and don’t believe anyone who says you can), this illustrates the need for an efficient cloud culture quite starkly.

Using FinOps work to kick start the GreenOps journey

As with any new initiative or cultural change, GreenOps can be dogged by a lack of adoption due to the usual blockers. I.e. Slow time to value, reluctance to take the first step. And so on.

In fact, for many teams, these objections may even be slowing down FinOps adoption itself... creating an extra reluctance to embrace GreenOps - “Not another metric to monitor and to-do list to complete!”

But what lots of teams don’t realise is that, through any FinOps work they have begun, they have already started their GreenOps journey. They might not be consciously optimizing their cloud for sustainability – but the remediations they’ve executed will likely be doing so anyway. If only they had the data to quantify this, the GreenOps time-to-value would become very short.

A typical example I see a lot

"Right sizing" refers to the practice of adjusting the size and capacity of cloud computing resources to match the actual usage needs as closely as possible. This concept is an integral one to FinOps strategies because it helps ensure that a company pays only for the computing power it actually needs, rather than overspending on underutilized resources.

So, let's say a cloud team at a medium-sized tech company discovers that their cloud-based application servers are only heavily utilized during business hours. By applying auto-scaling, they could automatically right-size these resources during off-peak hours, thus significantly cutting down costs without affecting performance during critical times.

Most people can intuitively figure out that processes like right-sizing & autoscaling are going to save carbon as well as cost, but they don’t know by how much. So, even though that tech team has done the work - they are not reaping the GreenOps benefits, as they have no reliable data.

The power of a one-off assessment

The good news is that, with a high-quality enough methodology, it’s possible to retrospectively claim the value. As Head of GreenOps at Greenpixie, the first step I take with most customers is to measure the emissions of the last 6-12 months of their cloud usage, particularly if they’ve undertaken FinOps in that time.

This one-off assessment then reveals an untold sustainability story, which both demonstrates the positive impact of the cloud team’s optimization work and highlgihts areas for further improvement. This changes the narrative from “Here’s GreenOps - another thing for you to do” to “Great start! You’ve already done positive sustainability work in the cloud. Let’s keep going.”

Of course, the second goes down a lot better – and encourages further sustainability work. That’s why the real value of this initial one-off assessment lies in its ability to create a penny-drop moment for stakeholders across your company.

By clearly aligning carbon data with the cost metrics that engineers are accustomed to analyzing, all cloud purchasing decisions —whether past, present, or future—start to be viewed through a sustainability lens, as well as financial.

This applies to all cloud activities, including modernization, transformation, or migration, where efficient architecture will not just contribute to a project’s cost-effectiveness but also its carbon-efficiency.

The one-off assessment approach serves to build appetite within your team for cloud sustainability data. As new cloud purchasing decisions are made, engineers will want to consider carbon alongside the typical cost metrics they are used to and will therefore come to you looking for on-going cloud sustainability data, so that their GreenOps practice can mature.

The reciprocal relationship between FinOps and GreenOps

And don’t forget, carbon is a bigger motivator than cost when it comes to cutting cloud waste.

Climateaction.tech reported that, when asked “What personally motivates you the most when working towards KPIs or targets for reducing waste in IT (cloud or other IT resources)?” over 50% of cloud engineers chose ‘carbon’, with a further 16% selecting ‘cost & carbon’, and only 15% selecting ‘cost’ alone.

This means that introducing GreenOps metrics and practices to your cloud efficiency strategy will increase adoption of optimization efforts and, due to the large cross over of carbon and cost savings associated with cutting waste, lead to further financial savings as well as emissions savings.