Ever wonder how leading vendors are creating a green cloud computing strategy? A recent survey demonstrated that over half of IT leaders say that sustainability undertakings of the major cloud providers Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud are increasing.
Approx 80% expressed that they would like to pay more to conduct business with a vendor who's incorporating sustainable cloud infrastructure into their business model.
Sustainability in Cloud computing has been a real blessing in this era. Corporations can lessen their carbon footprint by combining technological activities in shared environments.
According to IDC Reports, the increasing adoption of cloud computing sustainability can impede over 1 billion metric tons of carbon emanations between 2021 and 2024. Cloud service companies are working to create sustainable cloud computing platforms.
In this blog post, we will explore how sustainable cloud computing infrastructure should be built and crucial aspects that business leaders must consider.
Leading Practices for Sustainable Cloud Computing
To build a sustainable cloud or implement green cloud computing, every corporation must consider the below-mentioned practices:
Improving resources
Software firms must optimize the resources in the cloud. The motto must be reducing carbon footprint in cloud computing infrastructure and energy consumption. It entails employing auto-scaling options to raise or lower resources as needed.
Selecting the best cloud provider
Organizations must opt for cloud providers concentrating on green cloud computing practices. They should also ensure that the cloud providers bring out neutral reports on its ecological impact.
Employ renewable energy
Forward-thinking software companies should utilize green energy to operate their data centers. Businesses may request cloud providers to switch to sustainable energy sources or pick another cloud service if they lack it.
Assessing and reporting
Moreover, they must analyze energy & resource utility and cloud infrastructure. It allows companies to find out and show ineffective applications.
Therefore, by implementing these effective practices, organizations can improve their strategies for building sustainable cloud computing infrastructure. Also, they can minimize their environmental impact. In a nutshell, the importance of sustainability in cloud computing is to boost operational effectiveness and reduce costs.
Key Considerations for Sustainable Cloud Infrastructure Development
According to Gartner's 2023 CEO survey, environmental sustainability will be a top 10 priority for companies. Increasing data center and cloud infrastructure optimization are practical strategies to lessen an organization's ecological footprint. It's due to cloud computing frequently accounts for a sizable amount of the carbon emissions of those organizations.
By 2026, 70% of companies will use the public cloud to get environmental sustainability outcomes. These are the 3 key considerations for sustainable cloud infrastructure development:
Discuss the sustainability objectives of the cloud service provider
IT leaders must know their company's sustainability timelines and goals before engaging with any service provider. It will help companies detect cloud service providers lined up with their goals. The most vital question that IT managers should ask is how cloud service providers can mitigate emissions linked with the services they consume.
In this case, the AWS customer carbon footprint tool comes in handy. As AWS keeps investing in sustainability throughout an IT infrastructure, new customers' carbon footprint tool employs accessible visualizations to exhibit their historical carbon emissions. Moreover, this tool helps estimate emissions using AWS rather than reviewing forecasted emissions and on-premise data centers.
The eCommerce giant Amazon utilizes this AWS tool, which has changed its future. Amazon continues to work toward its goals of using 100% green energy to sustain its business activities by 2025, five years faster than its initial goal of 2030, and moving towards net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
Assess energy effectiveness, renewable usage, and resource efficiency
You need to analyze metrics using a range of factors while evaluating the long-term viability of cloud service providers. First, consider a cloud data center's power use effectiveness (PUE). PUE is a common statistic that displays the cost of the facilities used for electricity and air conditioning distribution, which is the leading cause of inefficiencies in data centers.
Check the utilization of green power by the companies. Inquire of cloud suppliers what proportion of energy is derived from sustainable sources in the regions pertinent to the company's use of cloud-based services.
Ask about releases of greenhouse gases
Lastly, IT executives must comprehend how cloud computing companies track and control greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The GHG Protocol categorizes releases into three objectives and is the global norm for monitoring greenhouse gas emissions.
Benefits of Sustainable Cloud Infrastructure
The term cloud computing sustainability or green cloud computing demonstrates that cloud computing is environmentally amicable. So, these are the best advantages of building sustainable cloud infrastructure:
Minimized production of e-waste
Accumulation of electronic garbage is a serious hassle. Human health and the environment get harmed by this garbage discharge to the ecosystem. Each year, the USA solely throws away 30 million PCs. 14% of laptops are either thrown out or donated to charities. The e-waste remains to flow through a commerce loop in underdeveloped nations where it is imported.
One of the best sustainable cloud computing infrastructure examples is Apple, which has a market capitalization of over $2 trillion. This indicates Apple has a significant impact on e-waste generation and disposal.
With the release of the iPhone 12, Apple made its most recent effort to incorporate environmentally friendly procedures into its corporate structure. Apple announced it would stop including the power brick and wired headphones in its package during the October 13th Keynote. These facts justify this:
- There currently exists around two billion power bricks
- The majority of users have or employ wireless headphones
- The reduced size would allow the shipment of 70% more iPhones simultaneously.
Utilizing green cloud computing to save energy
The use of cloud computing has helped reduce the consumption of electricity to some extent. Less energy is utilized because there's less equipment on the site when using cloud computing.
Apart from all the benefits, cloud computing sustainability issues persist. The most significant issues in cloud computing are compliance, privacy, abuse, security, and elevated costs.
How to Achieve Sustainability in Cloud Computing?
Virtualization, containerization, and workload consolidation in reducing resource consumption are the best practices to obtain sustainability in cloud computing.
Virtualization
It's an effective strategy for improving servers to employ hardware more effectively. Virtualization lets several virtual servers function on one physical server hardware. It minimizes the number of physical servers and results in lowered energy consumption.
Containerization
Containerization is a crucial means to get uniformity at the sub-virtual machine threshold, enabling portable applications to be bundled compactly and be rapidly and consistently ingested by PaaS clouds everywhere. Containers increase productivity in two ways: by utilizing all available assets and by reducing expenses.
Workload consolidation
Companies of all sizes are looking for strategies to streamline IT processes and cut costs. For many people, the best option to cut IT costs is to consolidate workloads into more compact and managed computing systems.
More businesses are implementing green cloud computing as they become more conscious of the adverse effects of cloud computing. As novel methods and innovations are developed to increase energy utilization and reduce carbon footprints, the prospect for green cloud computing appears bright.
Read our previous article, Cloud-Based Systems Vs. On-Premise Solutions: Why Do Cloud Systems Win?