All posts by Margaret O'Toole

Architecting for sustainability: a re:Invent 2021 recap

Post Syndicated from Margaret O'Toole original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/architecting-for-sustainability-a-reinvent-2021-recap/

At AWS re:Invent 2021, we announced the AWS Well-Architected Sustainability Pillar, which marks sustainability as a key pillar of building workloads to best deliver on business need. In session ARC325 – Architecting for Sustainability, Adrian Cockcroft, Steffen Grunwald, and Drew Engelson (Director of Engineering at Starbucks) gave a detailed explanation of what to expect from the Sustainability Pillar whitepaper and how Starbucks has applied AWS best practices to their workloads.

AWS is committed to building a sustainable business for our customers and the planet. Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge in 2019, committing to reach net-zero carbon by the Year 2040 — 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. As part of reaching our commitment, Amazon is on a path to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025 — 5 years ahead of our original target of 2030.

In 2020, we became the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, reaching 65% renewable energy across our business. Amazon also continues to invest in renewable energy projects paired with energy storage: the energy storage systems allow Amazon to store clean energy produced by its solar projects and deploy it when solar energy is unavailable, such as in the evening hours, or during periods of high demand. This strengthens the climate impact of Amazon’s clean energy portfolio by enabling carbon-free electricity throughout more parts of the day.

As customers architect solutions with AWS services to fulfill their business needs, they also influence the sustainability of a workload. AWS had published five pillars in the AWS Well-Architected Framework that capture best practices for operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, and cost of workloads. These pillars have supported the business need for faster time-to-value for features and the delivery of products.

In light of the climate crisis, we have a new challenge to help businesses optimize their application architectures and workloads for sustainability. With sustainability as the sixth pillar in the AWS Well-Architected Framework, builders have guidance to optimize their workloads for energy reduction and efficiency improvement across all components of a workload.

How Starbucks is reducing their footprint

Starbucks has set very ambitious sustainability goals to reduce the environmental impact of their business. As Drew Engelson mentioned in his presentation, there was a gap between these major goals and how members of the technology teams could participate in this mission. Drew decided to evaluate the systems his team was responsible for and initiated an internal framework for understanding the environmental impact of the systems.

Sustainability proxy metrics based on service usage, as demonstrated in the AWS Well-Architected Lab for Sustainability, complemented AWS customer carbon footprint tool data to help the team drive reductions. The goal was to snap a baseline and identify areas for further optimization. The Starbucks team applied the Well-Architected Sustainability Pillar best practices after performing an AWS Well-Architected review early in the process.

Through working with AWS, Starbucks saw that from 2019 to 2020, the actual carbon footprint of their AWS workloads was reduced by approximately 32%, despite tremendous business growth during that same period. The customer carbon footprint tool indicates that these systems’ carbon footprint was further reduced by 50% in subsequent quarters.

Optimizing beyond cost

The Starbucks team already optimized their workloads for cost efficiency, leading to high energy and resource efficiency. Starbucks relies heavily on Kubernetes, which allows them to densely pack their services onto the underlying infrastructure, yielding very high utilization. Binary protocols, like gRPC, are used for efficient communication between microservices. This also cuts down on the data transfer between different networks. Many of their services are written in efficient Scala code, which adds another layer of optimization to the workload.

By taking a data-driven approach, Drew and his team at Starbucks also were able to review scaling thresholds. Based on data, they were able to adjust the auto scaling curve much more closely and smoothly, matching the actual demand curve and reducing the resources they needed to provision.

Drew’s team went beyond the initial optimization cost-benefits to sustainability of the whole stack. They identified workloads suitable for Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to leverage unused, on-demand capacity and increase the overall resource utilization of the cloud. The Starbucks team is starting to examine the impact of their mobile application to end-user devices, and they are taking steps to reduce the downstream impacts: for example, considering the size of client-side scripts, devices’ CPU usage, and color scheme (dark mode reduces the energy required for certain display types).

Starbucks takes optimization for sustainability seriously—so seriously that they coined the term “TCO2”, which highlights the importance climate impact when measuring Total Costs of Ownership (Figure). Drew raised an important question for application teams and architects that frequently make tradeoffs for cost benefits:

If carbon was the thing we’re optimizing for, would we make different choices?

Drew Engelson, Director of Engineering at Starbucks, discussing "TCO2"

Figure. Drew Engelson, Director of Engineering at Starbucks, discussing “TCO2

Get started, the sustainable way

At AWS, we encourage architects to build solutions with sustainability in mind. If your team wants to get started with the concepts from the AWS Well-Architected Sustainability Pillar, conduct a review of your workload in the Well-Architected Tool, or check out the AWS Well-Architected Framework and AWS Well-Architected Labs to learn more!

Ask an Expert – Sustainability

Post Syndicated from Margaret O'Toole original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/ask-an-expert-sustainability/

In this first edition of Ask an Expert, we chat with Margaret O’Toole, Worldwide Tech Leader – Environmental Sustainability and Joseph Beer, Worldwide Tech Leader – Power and Utilities about sustainability solutions and tools to implement sustainability practices into IT design.

When putting together an AWS architecture to solve business problems specifically for sustainability-focused customers, what are some of the considerations?

A core idea of sustainability comes down to efficiency: how can we do the most work with the fewest number of resources? In this case, you want efficiency when you design and build the solution and also when you apply and operate it.

In broad strokes, there are two main things to consider. First, you want to optimize technology usage to reduce impact. Second, you want to find and use the best mix of technology to support sustainability. These objectives must also delight your customers, constituents, and stakeholders as you meet your business objectives in the most cost effective and expeditious way possible.

However, to be successful in combining technology and sustainability, you must consider the culture change of the sustainability transformation. Sustainability must become part of each person’s job function. When it comes to responsibility around sustainability at AWS, we think about it through two lenses.

First, we have the sustainability OF the AWS Cloud, which is our responsibility at AWS. This covers the work we do around purchasing renewable energy, operating efficiently, reducing water consumption in the data centers, and so on. There is more information on sustainability of the AWS Cloud on our sustainability page.

Then, there’s sustainability IN the cloud, which focuses on customers and their AWS usage. This is again focused on efficiency, mostly how to optimize existing patterns of user consumption, data access, software and development patterns, and hardware utilization.

In a related but slightly different vein, we also talk about sustainability THROUGH the cloud. This is how our customers use AWS to work on sustainability projects that help them meet their sustainability goals. This can include anything from carbon tracking or accounting to route optimization for fleets to using machine learning (ML) to reduce packaging and anything in between.

What are the general architecture pattern trends for sustainability in the cloud?

Solutions designed with sustainability in mind aim to be highly efficient. An architect wanting to optimize for sustainability looks for opportunities within user patterns, software patterns, development/test patterns, hardware patterns, and data patterns.

There is no one-size-fits-all way to optimize for sustainability, but the core themes are maximizing utilization and reducing waste or duplication. Most customers start with relatively easy things to accomplish. These typically include things like using the AWS Instance Scheduler to turn off compute when it will not be used or comparing cost and utilization reports to find hot spots to reduce utilization.

Another way to optimize for sustainability is to incorporate AWS Managed Services (AMS) as much as possible (many of these are also serverless). AMS not only increases the speed and efficiency of your design and build time and lower your overhead to run, but they also include automatic scaling as part of the service, which increases compute efficiency. Where AMS is not applicable, you can often configure automatic scaling into the solutions themselves. Automate everything, including your continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD) code pipeline, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI)/ML pipelines, and infrastructure builds where you are not using AMS.

And finally, include ongoing AWS Well-Architected reviews and continuously review and optimize your usage of AMS and the size and mix of your compute and storage in your standard operating procedures.

What are the key AWS-based sustainability solutions you are seeing customers ask for across industries and unique to specific industries?

Almost all industries have a set of shared challenges. This generally includes things like facilities or building management, design or optimization, and carbon tracking/footprinting. To help with this, customers must first understand the impact of their facilities, operations, or supply chain. Many customers use AWS services for ingestion, aggregation, and transformation of their real-world data. Once the data is collected and customers understand their relative impact, this data can be used to form models, which act as the basis for optimization. Technologies such as AWS IoT Core, Amazon Managed Blockchain, and AWS Lake Formation are crucial here.

For industries like power and utilities, there are more targeted solutions. Many of these are aimed at supporting the transition to electric vehicles (EVs). Smart EV charging, for example, uses the AWS Cloud and AI/ML to lessen the aggregate impact to the grid that may occur because of EV charging peaks and ramp ups. This helps avoid requiring natural gas at peak times. Amazon Forecast, a fully managed service that delivers highly accurate forecasts, can be useful in the case of short-term electric load forecasting. Grid voltage optimization is another solution that allows utilities to forecast usage requests and more accurately provide the desired voltage to their customers.

Within supply chains, customers use AWS to support traceability and carbon dashboarding to nudge suppliers toward greener energy. Customers commonly look for ways to track and trace throughout their supply chains, either to measure and reduce scope 3 emissions or to optimize their logistics network.

What’s your outlook for sustainability, and what role will the cloud play in future development efforts?

The cloud is critical to solving sustainability challenges that businesses and governments are being challenged with right now. It gives you the flexibility to use resources only when you need them, coupled with immense computing power. Thus, the cloud will be an essential tool in solving many data challenges like reporting and measuring and predicting and analyzing trends.

Migration to the cloud is essential to optimizing workloads and handling massive amounts of data. We can see this directly in how Boom used AWS HPC to support the creation of the world’s fastest and most sustainable aircraft. Additionally, FLSmidth is pursuing sustainable, technology-driven productivity under MissionZero. This initiative is working to achieve zero emissions and zero waste in cement production and mining by 2030 with the help of AWS high performance computing (HPC).

Do you see different trends in sustainability in the cloud versus on-premises?

The usage pattern is different. With the cloud you can use what you want, whenever you want, which allows for customers to drive up a high utilization. This type of efficiency is critical. It’s why 451 Research found that the same task can be completed on AWS with an 88% lower carbon footprint compared to the average surveyed US enterprise data center.

The cloud offers technology that wouldn’t be available on premises, such as large GPU-backed instances capable of processing huge amounts of data in hours that would take weeks on premises. It can also ingest massive streams of data from energy- and resource-consuming and producing assets to optimize their performance and environmental impact in near-real-time.

With the cloud, you have the flexibility and the power to move quickly through research and development to solve sustainability challenges. You can accelerate the development process of new ideas and solutions, which will be essential for the transformation to a carbon neutral, climate positive economy.

Deepen Your Knowledge of Architecting for Sustainability at re:Invent

Post Syndicated from Margaret O'Toole original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/deepen-your-knowledge-of-architecting-for-sustainability-at-reinvent/

This year, AWS customers took on sustainability challenges, including energy efficient building management, environmental and social governance reporting, and near-real-time renewable energy plant monitoring. Underscoring these unique and compelling projects is a need to understand, at the developer level, how to architect sustainably. So, this year, we’re excited to share sustainability content at re:Invent to inspire teams, to learn from each other, to get hands on, and to see what‘s possible when we combine technology with sustainability.

I recommend that all architects, developers, and anyone involved with AWS workloads tune in to ARC325, Architecting for sustainability. In this session, we’ll explore why teams would want to architect sustainably, and then dive into practical actions teams can apply to their own workloads. (You’ll also learn a bit about what AWS does to optimize for sustainability). ARC325 will feature an AWS enterprise customer and their engineering teams’ sustainability journey. Sustainability is an important non-functional requirement for their engineering teams, so they created a process to factor sustainability into their workload planning and execution. This will be an engaging session for engineering teams seeking to include sustainability into their workflows.

I’m personally very excited about STG209, Building a sustainable infrastructure with AWS Cloud storage. It will cover different storage options at AWS and how using efficient storage options strategically can help teams lower their storage carbon footprint.

I also recommend reserving a spot in Nat Sahlstrom’s session, ARC206, Sustainability in AWS global infrastructure. Nat is a Director, AWS energy strategy, and will share updates on AWS sustainability efforts, including updates on Amazon’s path to reach 100% renewable energy by 2025. Nat will also cover some key topics, such as water stewardship and how we work with communities in which our data centers are built.

Software developers and teams will definitely want to tune in for OPN301, Using Rust to minimize environmental impact. Studies have shown that Rust consumes less energy than other programming languages such as Python (98% less), Java (50% less), and C++ (23% less). In OPN301, Chairwoman of the Rust Foundation, Shane Miller, and AWS teammate, Carl Lerche, will explain how the efficiency gains of Rust can enable more workloads per watt and how to start using Rust in your own projects.

Explore hands-on sustainability activities

Check out our AWS GameDay – Reuse, Recycle, Reduce, Rearchitect. GameDays are collaborative learning exercises that test your skills as you implement AWS solutions (or fix broken ones) to solve real-world challenges in a gamified, risk-free environment. In Reuse, Recycle, Reduce, Rearchitect, teams play the role of new hires in a fictitious company (Unicorn.Rentals). Unicorn.Rentals rents unicorns to travelers around the world and has just made a holistic commitment to transform its business for sustainability. Teams will help Unicorn.Rentals find and reduce hotspots in their AWS usage and help optimize architectures for sustainability by better matching resource consumption to need, selecting the right instance to get the job done, and improving the efficiency of their software. Then, teams will help Unicorn.Rentals predict (and avoid) wildfires and understand and rank their suppliers based on sustainability commitments. After the GameDay, teams will understand practically how to architect sustainably and see some ways IT can support the sustainability goals of the broader organization.

For those looking for a creative build outlet, we will have the Code Green! Hackathon, where entrants can build sustainability solutions using data from the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) or the AWS Data Exchange. All code resulting from the hackathon will be open sourced. You can see previous hack results from 2019 here.

Celebrate AWS customers innovating for sustainability

Don’t miss our special premiere video screening of AWS customers addressing climate change and driving sustainability! Climate Next is an original documentary series about AWS customers using AWS technologies to fight climate change. The short-form documentaries feature inspiring stories and engaging cinematography. We will host a Q&A reception with featured customers and the creative producer immediately following the screening. Join us for this special premiere screening at re:Invent Tuesday, November 30 at 6:30-8:00 pm PDT.

There’s even more going on, so we’ve put together a re:Invent sustainability attendee guide to make it easy to find all sessions related to sustainability. We hope you can join us – either in person or virtually!

We look forward to seeing you there!