Tag Archives: Earth Day

Prioritizing sustainable cloud architectures: a how-to round up

Post Syndicated from Kate Brierley original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/prioritizing-sustainable-cloud-architectures-a-how-to-round-up/

With Earth Month upon us and in celebration of Earth Day tomorrow, 4/22, sustainability is top-of-mind for individuals and organizations around the world. But it doesn’t take a certain time of year to act toward the urgent need to innovate and adopt smarter, more efficient solutions!

Sustainable cloud architectures are fundamental to sustainable workloads, and we’re spotlighting content that helps build solutions to meet and advance sustainability goals. Here’s our recent post round up to make sustainable architectures meaningful and actionable for customers of all kinds:

Architecting for Sustainability at AWS re:Invent 2022

This post spotlights the AWS re:Invent 2022 sustainability track and key conversations around sustainability of, in, and through the cloud. It covers key uses cases and breakout sessions, including AWS customers demonstrating best practices from the AWS Well-Architected Framework Sustainability Pillar. Hear about these and more:

  • The Amazon Prime Video experience using the AWS sustainability improvement process for Thursday Night Football streaming
  • Pinterest’s sustainability journey with AWS from Pinterest Chief Architect David Chaiken

David Chaiken, Chief Architect at Pinterest, describes Pinterest’s sustainability journey with AWS

Let’s Architect! Architecting for Sustainability

The most recent sustainability focused Let’s Architect! series post shares practical tips for making cloud applications more sustainable. It also covers the AWS customer carbon footprint tool to help organizations monitor, analyze, and reduce their AWS footprint, and details how Amazon Prime Video used these tools to establish baselines and drive significant efficiencies across their AWS usage.

Prime Video case study for understanding how the architecture can be designed for sustainability

Optimizing your Modern Data AWS Infrastructure for Sustainability Series

This two-part blog series explores more specific topics relating to the Sustainability Pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework as connected to the Modern Data Architecture on AWS. What’s covered includes:

  1. Integrating a data lake and purpose-built data services to efficiently build analytics workloads to provide speed and agility at scale in Part 1 – Data Ingestion and Data Lake
  2. Guidance and best practices to optimize the components within the unified data governance, data movement, and purpose-built analytics pillars in Part 2 – Unified Data Governance, Data Movement, and Purpose-built Analytics

Modern Data Analytics Reference Architecture on AWS

How to Select a Region for your Workload Based on Sustainability Goals

Did you know workload Region selection significantly affects KPIs including performance, cost, and carbon footprint? For example, when an AWS Region is chosen based on the market-based method, emissions are calculated using the electricity that business purchases. Contracting and purchasing electricity produced by renewable energy sources like solar and wind are more sustainable. Region selection is is another part of the Well-Architected Framework Sustainability Pillar, and this blog post covers key considerations for choosing AWS Regions per workload.

Carbon intensity of electricity for South Central Sweden

Check back soon for more earth-friendly advice from our experts!

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.

A collection of posts to help you design and build sustainable cloud architecture

Post Syndicated from Bonnie McClure original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/a-collection-of-posts-to-help-you-design-and-build-sustainable-cloud-architecture/

We’re celebrating Earth Day 2022 from 4/22 through 4/29 with posts that highlight how to build, maintain, and refine your workloads for sustainability.


A blog can be a great starting point for you in finding and implementing a particular solution; learning about new features, services, and products; keeping up with the latest trends and ideas; or even understanding and resolving a tricky problem. Today, as part of our Earth Day celebration, we’re showcasing blog posts that do just that and more.

Optimize AI/ML workloads for sustainability series

Training artificial intelligence (AI) services and machine learning (ML) workloads uses a lot of energy, but they are also one of the best tools we have to fight the effects of climate change. For example, we’ve used ML to help deliver food and pharmaceuticals safely and with much less waste, reduce the cost and risk involved in maintaining wind farms, restore at-risk ecosystems, and predict and understand extreme weather.

In this series of three blog posts, Benoit, Eddie, Dan, and Brendan provide guidance from the Sustainability Pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework to reduce the carbon footprint of your AI/ML workloads.

ML lifecycle

Machine learning lifecycle

Improve workload sustainability with services and features from re:Invent 2021

Creating a well-architected, sustainable workload is a continuous process. This blog post highlight services and features from re:Invent 2021 that will help you design and optimize your AWS workloads from a sustainability perspective.

Optimizing Your IoT Devices for Environmental Sustainability

To become more environmentally sustainable, customers commonly introduce Internet of Things (IoT) devices. These connected devices collect and analyze data from commercial buildings, factories, homes, cars, and other locations to measure, understand, and improve operational efficiency. However, you must consider their environmental impact when using these devices. They must be manufactured, shipped, and installed; they consume energy during operations; and they must eventually be disposed of. They are also a challenge to maintain—an expert may need physical access to the device to diagnose issues and update it. This post considers device properties that influence an IoT device’s footprint throughout its lifecycle and shows you how Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT services can help.

Let’s Architect! Architecting for Sustainability

This first post in the Let’s Architect! series gathers content to help software architects and tech leaders explore new ideas, case studies, and technical approaches. Luca, Laura, Vittori, and Zamira provide materials to help you address sustainability challenges and design sustainable architectures.

Optimizing your AWS Infrastructure for Sustainability Series

As organizations align their business with sustainable practices, it is important to review every functional area. If you’re building, deploying, and maintaining an IT stack, improving its environmental impact requires informed decision making.

This three-part blog series provides strategies to optimize your AWS architecture within compute, storage, and networking.

The shared responsibility model for sustainability shows how it is a shared responsibility between AWS and customers

The shared responsibility model for sustainability shows how it is a shared responsibility between AWS and customers

IBM Hackathon Produces Innovative Sustainability Solutions on AWS

Our consulting partner, IBM, organized the “Sustainability Applied 2021” hackathon in September 2021. This three-day event aimed to generate new ideas, create reference architecture patterns using AWS Cloud services, and produce sustainable solutions.

This post highlights four reference architectures that were developed during the hackathon. These architectures show you how IBM hack teams used AWS services to resolve real-world sustainability challenges. We hope these architectures inspire you to help address other sustainability challenges with your own solutions.

Happy Earth Day: Announcing Green Compute open beta

Post Syndicated from Kabir Sikand original https://blog.cloudflare.com/earth-day-2022-green-compute-open-beta/

Happy Earth Day: Announcing Green Compute open beta

Happy Earth Day: Announcing Green Compute open beta

At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. We continue to grow our network, and it is important for us to do so responsibly.

Since Earth Day 2021, some pieces of this effort have included:

And we are just getting started. We are working to make the Cloudflare network — and our customers’ websites, applications, and networks — as efficient as possible in terms of design, hardware, systems, and protocols. After all, we do not want to lose sight of our responsibilities to our home: our planet Earth.

Green Compute for Workers Cron Triggers

During Impact Week last year, we began testing Green Compute in a closed beta. Green Compute makes Workers Cron Triggers run only in facilities that are powered by renewable energy. We are hoping to incentivize more facilities to implement responsible climate and energy policies.

With Green Compute enabled, Workers Cron Triggers will run only on Cloudflare points of presence that are located in data centers that are powered by 100% renewable energy.

Based on carbon accounting and renewable energy standards like RE100, all Cloudflare operations are considered 100% powered by renewable energy because we purchase the same amount of renewable energy as the total energy we use globally.

However, the data centers we operate in are co-located with facilities owned by other companies. Although our renewable energy purchases cover the energy used by our equipment, all other energy consumed at that facility may or may not be renewable.

Renewable energy can be purchased in a number of ways, including:

  • Through on-site generation (wind turbines, solar panels)
  • Directly from renewable energy producers through contractual agreements called Power Purchase Agreements (PPA)
  • In the form of Renewable Energy Credits (RECs, IRECs, GoOs) from an energy credit market that helps offset energy use on-site
Happy Earth Day: Announcing Green Compute open beta

How to get started with Green Compute

Today, we are happy to announce that we are bringing this function to all our developers — Green Compute is now in open beta. To get started, head to your Workers App, click Change Setting under Compute Setting, and select Green Compute.

Happy Earth Day: Announcing Green Compute open beta

Now, any time you create a scheduled workload, you will see a leaf icon indicating that your schedules will be run in data centers powered by renewable energy sources. With just one click, you can help build a better Internet.

Next steps

  • Want to get more involved with the Cloudflare Developer community, help shape what we build next, or give feedback on Green Compute? Enter our Discord and join the conversation.
  • Learn more about how Cloudflare is helping build a better Internet via Cloudflare Impact.

Introducing Greencloud

Post Syndicated from Annika Garbers original https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-greencloud/

Introducing Greencloud

Introducing Greencloud

Over the past few days, as part of Cloudflare’s Impact Week, we’ve written about the work we’re doing to help build a greener Internet. We’re making bold climate commitments for our own network and facilities and introducing new capabilities that help customers understand and reduce their impact. And in addition to organization-level initiatives, we also recognize the importance of individual impact — which is why we’re excited to publicly introduce Greencloud, our sustainability-focused employee working group.

What is Greencloud?

Greencloud is a coalition of Cloudflare employees who are passionate about the environment. Initially founded in 2019, we’re a cross-functional, global team with a few areas of focus:

  1. Awareness: Greencloud compiles and shares resources about environmental activism with each other and the broader organization. We believe that collective action — not just conscious consumerism, but also engagement in local policy and community movements — is critical to a more sustainable future, and that the ability to affect change starts with education. We’re also consistently inspired by the great work other folks in tech are doing in this space, and love sharing updates from peers that push us to do better within our own spheres of influence.
  2. Support: Our membership includes Cloudflare team members from across the org chart, which enables us to be helpful in supporting multidisciplinary projects led by functional teams within Cloudflare.
  3. Advocacy: We recognize the importance of both individual and organization-level action. We continue to challenge ourselves, each other and the broader organization to think about environmental impact in every decision we make as a company.

Our vision is to contribute on every level to addressing the climate crisis and creating a more sustainable future, helping Cloudflare become a clear leader in sustainable practices among tech companies. Moreover, we want to empower our colleagues to make more sustainable decisions in each of our individual lives.

What has Greencloud done so far?

Since launching in 2019, Greencloud has created a space for conversation and idea generation around Cloudflare’s sustainability initiatives, many of which have been implemented across our organization. As a group, we’ve created content to educate ourselves and external audiences about a broad range of sustainability topics:

  • Benchmarked Cloudflare’s sustainability practices against peer companies to understand our baseline and source ideas for improvement.
  • Curated guides for colleagues on peer-reviewed content, product recommendations, and “low-hanging fruit” actions we all have the ability to take, such as choosing a sustainable 401k investment plan and using a paperless option for all employee documents.
  • Hosted events such as sustainability-themed trivia/quiz nights to spark discussion and teach participants techniques for making more sustainable decisions in our own homes and lives.

In addition to creating “evergreen” resources and hosting events, Greencloud threw a special celebration for April 22, 2021 — the 51st global Earth Day. For the surrounding week, we hosted a series of events to engage our employees and community in sustainability education and actions.

Greencloud TV Takeover

You can catch reruns of our Earth Week content on Cloudflare TV, covering a broad range of topics:

Tuesday: Infrastructure
A chat with Michael Aylward, Head of Cloudflare’s Network Partners Program and renewable energy expert, about the carbon footprint of Internet infrastructure. We explored how the Internet contributes to climate change and what tech companies, including Cloudflare, are doing to minimize this footprint.

Wednesday: Policy
An interview with Doug Kramer, Cloudflare’s General Counsel, and Patrick Day, Cloudflare’s Senior Policy Counsel, on the overlap between sustainability, tech, and public policy. We dove into how tech companies, including Cloudflare, are working with policymakers to build a more sustainable future.

Thursday: Cloudflare and the Climate
Francisco Ponce de León interviewed Sagar Aryal, the CTO of Plant for the Planet, an organization of young Climate Justice Ambassadors with the goal of planting one trillion trees. Plant for the Planet is a participant in Project Galileo, Cloudflare’s program providing free protection for at-risk public interest groups.

In addition, Amy Bibeau, our Greencloud Places team lead, interviewed Cloudflare’s Head Of Real Estate and Workplace Operations, Caroline Quick and LinkedIn’s Dana Jennings, Senior Project Manager, Global Sustainability for a look into the opportunities and challenges around creating sustainable workplaces. Like most companies, Cloudflare is re-thinking what our workplace will look like post-COVID.  Baking sustainability into those plans, and being a model for other companies, can be game changing.

Friday: Personal Impact & Trivia
A panel of Greencloud employees addressed the challenge of personal versus collective/system-level action and broke down some of the highest value actions we’re working on taking in our own lives.

Finally, Greencloud took over Cloudflare TV’s signature game show Silicon Valley Squares with Earth Day-themed questions!

Get engaged

No one person, group, or organization working alone can save our planet — the degree of collective action required to reverse climate change is staggering, but we’re excited and inspired by the work that leaders across every industry are pitching in every day. We’d love for you and/or your organization to join us in this calling to create a more sustainable planet and tell us about your initiatives to exchange ideas.