GreenOps

GreenOps – How to reduce your carbon footprint in the cloud 

Cloud computing has revolutionized the way we store data compared to traditional on-site IT infrastructures, Switching workloads to a public cloud provider helps cut down on-premise data centers that significantly lower carbon footprints and energy consumption.

Still, Sustainability in the cloud must be taken into consideration, for both the cloud providers and the cloud builders to ensure that they are architecting, designing, and building sustainable ecosystems.

As a solution, GreenOps introduced a new operational model that works towards reducing the cloud carbon footprint. 

In this blog, we are going to delve into six green ops best practices you can do as a customer of cloud services when architecting and building solutions in the cloud and we will share some of GreenOps’performance indicators to help you estimate your cloud footprint.

How to reduce your cloud carbon footprint

1. Shared responsibility model

The first step in implementing an efficient GreenOps framework is to understand the concept of shared responsibility between the cloud provider and the client and what effort each of the parties is taking to provide a greener and more efficient cloud.

The below image is a shared responsibility model by AWS, It helps depicts both parties’ responsibility when it comes to cloud sustainability by understanding what areas to focus on to reduce their footprint. Understanding everyone’s responsibilities is the first step toward implementing greenOp best practices.  

                                     Shared responsibility model for sustainability by AWS

2. Code efficiency

Compiled languages like C and Rust are more energy efficient than virtual machine languages like Java and C#, and far ahead of interpreted languages like Ruby, Python, and Perl, according to the study Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages.

3. FinOps

FinOps plays an important role in the strategy. It is a framework that aims to optimize the cloud through developing communication and collaboration between business and engineering. By optimizing cloud resource usage, you will reduce your carbon footprint. Some of FinOp’s best practices are set up a tagging system, idle instances, and right-sizing  (AWS Lambda and Fargate, Azure Container Instances, GCP Cloud Functions, and Cloud Run.)

4. Cloud-native solutions

Using intelligent and cloud-native solutions such as event-driven, serverless technologies like AWS DynamoDB, and AWS Lambda will create a more scalable, adaptable solution and will lower your infrastructure and maintenance costs in the long run

5. Use managed cloud service: 

Managed cloud services offer partial or complete management of a client’s cloud resources or infrastructure. Management responsibilities can include migration, configuration, optimization, security, and maintenance. These services are designed to enable organizations to maximize benefits from cloud services while minimizing internal time and costs. choosing the right is a very important step, make sure that your managed cloud services will implement right from the start, the GreenOps best practices

6. Use a green cloud provider: 

Switching to more energy-efficient servers is an important step, Cloud service providers have recognized the potential impact of their service offering on the global climate crisis and are taking steps to mitigate it.

Azure, Aws, and GCP have introduced initiatives to curb co2 emission by using observability tools that convert system data to practicable insights through which you can monitor and control everything you do to drive sustainable business growth. Azure and GCP have introduced the Sustainability Calculator Carbon Footprint Tool respectively while AWS has come up with its Customer Carbon Footprint Tool.

GreenOps’performance indicators

Apart from using the GreenOps practices mentioned, you need to measure your efforts by choosing the right KPI and tools to help you estimate your current cloud footprint:

PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness)

PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) is a ratio that describes how efficiently a computer data center uses energy. In other words, it evaluates the energy consumption used only by cloud providers when it comes to cooling and other overhead that supports the equipment. It is recommended that you ask your cloud provider to be transparent about their PUE with you. 

Choose your Carbon proxies

GreenOps is about making a change in order to do so, you need to measure your current state and work towards its optimization, examples of metrics : 

  • Electricity consumption is a useful proxy that allows developers to optimize the energy consumed by an application to reduce the amount of carbon it’s responsible for emitting. 
  • Data size: The larger the size of data you are transmitting, the more energy and computing it requires to transmit. 
  • Age weight: A good metric to choose here for websites is page weight – the overall size of all the assets in your website.
  • The distance The more distance the data has to travel, the more computing and energy is needed. Therefore, the distance that data has to travel is also a carbon proxy.

Conclusion

GreenOps is a new model of studying cloud computing that aims to increase the efficiency of resource use of digital devices for a sustainable environment. On one hand, all major public cloud providers like Microsoft, AWS, and Google have adopted renewable energy resources for operating their data centers. On other hand, customers of cloud computing or managed cloud services must consider the whole lifecycle, from design and production to usage for Sustainable cloud computing. That’s why at PISQUARE we aim to provide you with a well-managed cloud infrastructure right from the start of your cloud migration by ensuring the implementation of FnOps and GeenOps best practices.

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