Sustainability with Cloud Cost Management
The majority of countries, organizations, and leaders on the planet are committed to the goal of compensating carbon emissions on our planet by 2050. For this great challenge to be met we have two major fronts, the first is obviously to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide in nature and the second is to increase the sources that can neutralize the gases emitted.
Despite all efforts so far, during the Summit of the Americas held in June 2022, an index presented by Yale University and Columbia (USA) found that only two countries (Denmark and Britain) are on the right track, and the others need to step up their actions to achieve the goal by the middle of the century.
Organizations can perform a collaborative role in this process. The adoption of the cloud for its incredible power and flexibility to enable products and services quickly has brought organizations together with unimaginable innovation power, but the same facility has become a problem for energy efficiency management, because we end up making intangible the energy consumption of cloud resources, unlike when organizations maintained their technology parks physically.
To make tangible these numbers, whether of energy consumption, as well as the metrification of CO2 emissions based on the resources used, cloud providers, have created reports, calculators, and dashboards that offer a very detailed view. In this other article, we talked more about these tools and how to use them in your accounts.
An organization with this information can now begin to put together an energy efficiency implementation plan for its resources. The quickest and simplest ways are usually:
Measurement of provisioned and unused resources — Often resources are created for certain activities with a beginning, middle, and end, such as proofs of concepts, and development environments, however many are forgotten to be eliminated and continue assets generating costs and energy consumption.
Supersizing machines or instances — With the ease of sizing instances for use, often based on previous experience for fear that resources are not enough, end up allocating more memory, space, and processing to ensure product stability. However, most of the time this provision of resources does not end up being used in its fullness, generating extra energy expenditures and consumption.
Unnecessary data retention — The volume of data collected and stored presents an increasing ascension curve, as a direct consequence this data is stored generated costs, there are two ways to make a reduction, either by changing the storage layer cheaper, as well as the destruction of the data that lose its validity to the business.
Replication of irrelevant data — Currently the most efficient way to ensure the quality of data is to replicate it in multiple locations, thus creating several copies of itself and enabling its recovery in almost loss, however, it is not all the data that requires this mechanism, especially non-productive information.
Maintenance of resources available in unused time window — Not even all machines work 24 x 7, be they to be used by people or routine programs, most often only in some time windows is necessary their availability, so it is essential that outside these intervals these same are paused or even de-provisioned, until the next window of need.
These are some actions that once implemented will generate a drastic reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from energy use in cloud resources. We can still add in this scenario the use of artificial intelligence to analyze our environments, whether in the cloud or on-site, to offer recommendations for correct scaling, as well as the efficient configuration of architecture scalability.
Through this process of implementing an enterprise sustainability strategy for your resources, we will already be enabling our organization to take its first steps in the world of cloud cost management, also known as FinOps. That is, we can generate cost cuts that can be reverted to actions aimed at increasing gas emission neutrality, such as project support and organizations that reforest areas.
The unification of Green Coding with FinOps will enable a culture of environmental responsibility, as well as promote greater transparency of costs. That is, efficiently allocating an organization’s financial resources is also reducing its carbon footprint, all of which ends up interconnecting and generating another reason for the adoption of the technology sustainability model, especially concerning cloud resources.
At GFT, we take seriously the idea of enabling our customers to foster the adoption of sustainability as part of the solution development process, for this purpose the Green Coding initiative was created. And in addition, we also offer consulting for FinOps culture implementation ensuring an integrated process and results for our customers and future generations.
