A few months back, I had written an article about Sustainability explaining what it is all about when it comes to software development. Since then I have come across this topic in several forums, including discussions with multiple client organizations that have pledged to quantify and improve on this subject.
Organizations that move their applications towards cloud services tremendously improve their IT environmental impacts and goals of being sustainable. They are several factors that an enterprise has to consider beyond just selecting a cloud provider to be considered environmentally sustainable.
Focus on the following 6 areas can help organizations kick start their Green IT revolution on Cloud.
a) Cost Aware Architecture thinking
In applications built on cloud infrastructure, there are several moving parts with innumerable services. Organizations who have moved to the cloud often find it very difficult to be cost-aware, ensuring optimal usage of these services.
They are so engrossed in building their core business applications that they don’t invest in cost-aware architecture teams that focus on optimizing the spending by eliminating unprovisioned infrastructure, resizing or terminating underutilized and using lifecycle management. Practices like energy audits, alerts and IT cloud analysis helps to identify costs and identify systems that need to be greened.
Cloud provides services like Azure Advisor and AWS Trusted Advisor helps to optimize and reduce overall cloud expenditure by recommending solutions to improve cost-effectiveness. Services like Azure Cost management and Billing, AWS Cost Explorer, and AWS Budgets can be used to analyze, understand, calculate, monitor, and forecast costs.
b) Sustainable
development
Building applications using modern technologies and cloud services help optimize development code and ensures faster deployments. It also enables in reduction of redundant storage and end-users energy levels.
Sustainable development on the cloud has many parts. It involves an end-to-end view of how the data traverses wholistically. Improving load times by optimizing caching strategies reduces the data size, data transfer quantity, and bandwidth. With new innovative edge service solutions and by serving the content from the appropriate systems, energy-efficient applications can be built reducing the distance at which the data travels.
c) Agile Architecture
One of the core Agile principles is to promote sustainable development and improve ways of working by making the development teams deliver at a consistent pace.
Cloud services provide tools like Azure and AWS DevOps, which is commonplace for development teams to organize, plan, collaborate on code development, build and deploy applications. It allows organizations to create and improve products faster than traditional software development approaches.
d) Increase Observability
There is a direct correlation between an organization's Observability maturity and Sustainability. In Observability, the focus is to cultivate ways of working within development teams to have a holistic data-driven mindset when solving system issues. The concept of Observability is becoming more and more prominent with the emergence and improvement of AI and ML-based services.
Service to improve automation diagnostics, automatic infra healing, and the advent of myriads of services used for deep code and infra drills, real-time analysis, debugging and profiling, alerts and notifications, logging and tracing, etc indirectly helps in organizations return of investment, increasing productivity
e)
Consumption-based Utilization
Rightly sized applications, enhanced deployment strategies, automated backup plans, and designing systems using Cloud's well-architected frameworks result in utilizing the underlying hardware and its energy efficiency. It also serves the organization's long-term goals of reducing consumption and power usages, improving network efficiencies, and securing systems. Utilizing the right cloud computing service also helps the applications to Scale Up or Out appropriately.
Using cloud-provided Carbon tracking calculators helps gauge systems or applications that require better optimization in terms of performance or better infrastructure.
Conclusion