EDF at the AWS Sustainability Game Day
By Kit Connick and Evie Skinner
At EDF, we are passionate about opportunities to enhance our knowledge and skills to support our goal of reaching Net Zero by 2050. With this, the AWS Sustainability Game Day was a perfect chance to understand how to be mindful of energy efficiency on the AWS infrastructure we leverage.
Two members of our Software Engineering and Data Science Teams took on the challenge and have offered to share their own perspective and advice from the day to fellow AWS enthusiasts!
Here is Kit’s story:
I spent a thoroughly enjoyable, thought provoking, and informative day at the AWS offices recently, with the big theme of the day being Sustainability. Sustainability is somewhat of a buzzword these days, and therefore has many different flavours of definition and interpretation. I take it to mean the thoughtful, conscious, and deliberate changing of your patterns, structures, and decisions, both as an individual and an organisation, to impact the world and the environment more positively. Specifically, making decisions that you could morally and ethically stand by if you imagined everyone else in the world also took the same decisions. These are kinds of feelings I was keeping in my mind throughout the day, as a helpful contextual reminder of why we were there.
The day started with a super insightful talk from Hilary Tam, Principal Business Development Manager at AWS in the Sustainability Transformation Acceleration Team. The crux of the talk was around becoming ‘future fit’, and how to accelerate your sustainability transformation. Being future fit was defined as “an aspirational state in order to remain relevant, compete, and generate value in an increasingly resource constrained, carbon intense reality”. On a similar note, there was an eloquent quote from a Professor at Saïd Business School that said, “The purpose of business is to produce profitable solutions to the problems of people and planet, not to profit from producing problems for people or planet”. This idea really set the tone for the day and brought into focus what we were trying to achieve. A common theme in the talk was around completely rethinking how we think about Sustainability in business, treating it as less of an expensive, arduous requirement and more like a value-creating, exciting opportunity.
One of the frameworks that AWS have is the Future Fit Framework, with four different increasingly future-fit levels. It ranges from understanding and reducing your IT footprint to meet Net Zero goals at Level 1, to organization-wide transformation embedding sustainability into core business strategy to unlock value at Level 4. With this framework in mind, the next part of the day was a brainstorming session to try and think about what we at EDF could do better around Sustainability, both as individuals and an organisation, technically and non-technically. There were so many awesome ideas being suggested, and it felt amazing to be talking about something so important with such passionate, creative people. It was also nice in the discussions to realise a lot of the great things we already do at EDF around Sustainability. Something I was thinking about a lot during the day was what a unique position we’re in as a company when it comes to Sustainability. EDF’s overarching goal is to reach Net Zero by 2050, and we are already Britain’s biggest zero carbon electricity generator. On top of that, with the millions of homes and businesses we’re deeply connected to, we have so much opportunity to create a genuine lasting impact on Sustainability in the whole of the UK at a deep, structural level. I for one am super excited and proud to even be a small part of that.
The rest of the day was taken up by the Game Day! This is the third AWS Game Day that I’ve taken part in now, and they are always incredibly fun (and intense!). As you would expect, this was a Sustainability themed Game Day. We were split into teams and given access to an AWS account with all the necessary services available to us. Much like the technical challenge on Bake Off, we were given pretty vague instructions on tasks we had to complete during the afternoon, ultimately with the aim of making our AWS estate more sustainable. Our tasks included, but were not limited to, automating how data is updated in an S3 data lake, implementing automatic scaling for EC2 instances optimizing for energy efficiency, and producing transparent reports on sustainable KPIs like waste, energy, and water consumption. As with all Game Days it was a very intense experience! I have a relatively small amount of AWS knowledge, and you’re thrown right in at the deep end. It’s an excellent opportunity, however, to work as a team with people that you likely haven’t worked with before and overcome the obstacles that come your way together! Crucially, it was a fantastic exercise to learn more about green software practises, as well as learning more about AWS in general and how to use their services. Having been to a Game Day every 6 months or so while at EDF, it feels incredibly satisfying to have been able to contribute more than I have ever done before. It feels like the product of 18 months of hard work and learning from so many fantastic people on the EDF Data and Tech graduate scheme. Thanks to the heroic efforts of my excellent teammates Evie Skinner and Anwar Bouchra, we managed to finish the day 3rd. I was rather proud of this as a relative AWS beginner! (And, not that I’m remotely competitive, but we did technically finish the day in second place as everyone’s points carried on ticking over, they just took the leaderboard results a few minutes too early…)
Overall, it was genuinely one of the most enjoyable, informative, and inspirational days I’ve ever had at work, filled with so much learning, and so many passionate people, all eager to do everything they can to help Britain achieve Net Zero.
Here is Evie’s Story:
The Sustainability Game Day was my first ever game day and I loved every minute of it! One of my favourite parts was straight after Hilary’s talk, where we split up into our teams and came up with quick post-it note ideas centred around how we can solve ecological problems with technology. In particular, it was fascinating to see my friends’ thought processes and how they differed to my own: for example, Kit had the idea to create educational opportunities for helping the public learn more about sustainability in tech, which was so different to some of the ideas I had. This educational aspect was the springboard for my idea of holding an eco-tech conference powered by the kinetic energy of human movement!
I think the fantastic variation in ideas was largely due to the diverse nature of those who attended: we had a wonderful group of people there who differed in terms of race, gender, region of the UK and other factors. In our team alone we had ideas relating to finance, software design and improvements to current EDF applications to name a few. This idea generation exercise wasn’t just beneficial for us in the context of the Game Day in isolation, but also highly useful to bring back to our green software interest group at EDF (contact us or Kate Bryan to join). We are currently in the process of deciding which post-it note ideas we want to pursue as a group with the wider company’s support, so watch this space!
During the game itself, I was really pleased to be able to pick which quests I would complete as I got the chance to challenge myself a lot. I took on a SQL challenge which I assumed would be a bit on the dull side, but was actually a lot of fun: I had to optimise some SQL code to make it more efficient, which was completely different to what I work on day-to-day! It brought back a lot of interesting memories of trying to write joins and other performance enhancements in relational databases.
I also got to work on a serverless Lambda function written in Python, which was quite a challenge. While I can read Python fairly easily, it was a great mental exercise to get comfortable with the fact that my code wouldn’t interpret without the correct number of tabbing spaces. I learnt a lot about AWS logging levels in this particular challenge too, which I’ve since applied in code reviews for the application I work on in my day-to-day job.
If you’re considering participating in a future Game Day but aren’t sure if it’s for you, I would say give it a try! You’ll get to have fun and learn some highly interesting things along the way.
