A Greener Cloud is a Cheaper Cloud
- Stephanie Gooch
- Jul 22, 2019
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 31, 2019
When people think of the cloud and reasons to migrate I believe they often use words like ‘scalability’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘costability’… wait no just cost, my bad. Anyway, reasons like this are normally the driving factor for the move to cloud. However, another amazing reason to do so is the positive environmental effect.
In simple terms moving from traditional infrastructure to the cloud has a positive impact on the environment as you are:
Sharing infrastructure resources meaning you get higher utilization
Cloud providers often have a more efficient use of resources
The scalability of the cloud means we use what we need, leaving less room for waste
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform have all committed to utilising sustainable energy sources over the last couple of years.
So with our cloud providers doing their best to make our work more environmentally friendly, why don’t we do the same?
In a couple of my posts I highlight and discuss wasted resources in accounts, as these can often be a driver for costs. For a business on a financial viewpoint it is key to remove these resources, and save money. But one thing not often considered is how this could benefit our environment.
In this article it was pointed out that “Common server utilization rates average between 10 and 20% across the industry. Turned around, that’s 80% to 90% wastage”. If you think about that from a cost point of view that’s biting 80% of your money and is bad for the environment as well!
Reviewing the utilisation of services such as EC2 and RDS can be as simple as deploying this dashboard in Cloudwatch. This will also setup and SNS topic for your to subscribe to to be notified if you EC2’s are over or under utilised.
This gives your an overview per Instance of how much CPU is used (can depend on application on services so choose what works for you). Or if you have Trusted Advisor they will tell you if you have under or over utilised services. For azure you can look at the advisor in your portal or the raw data is on the services.
If having a greener footprint is very important to your business and your chosen AWS region is not, then there is a handy chrome extension tool called the Cloud Sustainability Console. This shows 100% sustainable regions in your Cloud Console by highlighting them in green.
So, if your business is aiming to be greener and save money, then reviewing your cloud cost waste will be a way to do both.
Other Useful Links:
Special mention to Matt Frank for bringing this to my attention and being the inspiration for the post, thank you!
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