How to build a cloud fit for net zero

AWS Worldwide Tech Leader for Sustainability sets out some questions every cloud customer should ask

The transition to net zero will look different in every business. How can you optimise your cloud to shorten the journey?

Margaret O’Toole is Worldwide Tech Leader for Sustainability at AWS. Her role is to help customers who want to use AWS in support of their sustainability programs.

AWS have millions of customers and whilst many will share a net zero goal with similar deadlines, the transition will be different in each. O’Toole sets out some of the questions each will need to answer along the way.

“For customers are who are interested in understanding and optimising their usage, our typical way of engaging with this is working with customers to use the customer carbon footprint tool but also really get into the weeds about how they build an AWS.

What we work on is establishing this ratio with customers around the resources provisioned to complete a unit of work. So, how many cores have you provisioned? How much storage do you have? What's the backup strategy? How do we look at resiliency and failover and all these things? We find a lot of opportunities because we're looking at it per unit of work.”

What is the nature of these opportunities?

“We often find areas of customers where they could right size or scale differently,” O’ Toole replies. I think part of it is getting customers to do things like load test earlier in development, which we can work with them on and provide tooling around.”

A crucial part of building the most sustainable cloud infrastructure is the understanding that configurations must be continually revisited. The whole point of cloud infrastructure is its flexibility. The evolution of that infrastructure is a continual process.

“Workloads change. Maybe you build something with a little bit of buffer, and then you deploy it, and then over time, this buffer might grow. We need to continuously revisit things as operational excellence and go back and ask whether this is still fit for purpose. Are we still utilizing everything that we have provisioned?”

AWS have tooling available for customers seeking to answer these questions. One of them is the carbon footprint tool, which Computing has pointed out some significant flaws in. The calculations behind estimates of emissions avoided by running a workload in AWS as opposed to an in-premise datacentre are opaque. We have no idea what the counter factual datacentre looks like and how its emissions are calculated, and AWS doesn’t include its own scope 3 emissions in the data, so reported reductions in customer carbon footprint should be treated with a degree of scepticism.

That said, O’Toole explains that AWS customers are not limited to this tool, and that optimising the use of cloud resource involves blending knowledge of AWS with the knowledge of an individual customer.

“We also have tools like the cloud intelligence dashboards, which get more into what customers have used and how much work they're getting done with that. But we can't know what customers are getting out of their AWS usage. We know what they've provisioned, because we can see that usage, but it's up to them if that's the right thing for their workload. We usually have to work together to combine, the business knowledge as well as AWS knowledge. We have workshops and other things that we do with the account solutions architect and the customer to bring these pieces together.”

AWS Well-Architected Framework

Crucial for this process is the AWS Well-Architected Framework. This is best practice for how to build on AWS and there are six pillars: security, cost optimization, performance efficiency, operational excellence, reliability and sustainability. O’Toole expands on the framework.

“The well architected framework says that building in cloud is different than building on prem. You need to think about things through a different lens. We have learned by experience what to do and what not to do and what things to look out for. It’s close to 10 years old, but it's we've continuously shared with customers, because we want them to be successful.”

Sustainability was added to the existing five pillars in December 2021.

“When we introduced the sustainability pillar, we were saying a couple of things. First of all, we want you to consider this as part of your non-functional requirements. Secondly, we want you to think critically about how efficient you're being with AWS. We don't want customers to waste things. We want them to be incredibly intentional when they use AWS. The cloud is intentionally about actions. It's built to be flexible. It's built to have many, many services, and you pick the tool that's right for the job that you're trying to do.”

Lots of AWS customers are actively doing just this and asking questions about what they need, as opposed to what they could have.

“A customer might think, ‘I want the speed, but I also want to make sure that I'm prioritizing speed for the right workloads.’ An If a customer looks at performance metrics and finds that they’re over delivering on SLAs it’s an opportunity to take a step back and ask, ‘have we actually built this correctly? Is this the right place to be putting that kind of performance?’

“There are workloads where real time, immediate results are necessary and non-negotiable. And there are times when maybe we can wait a little bit to get our answer. We can think a little bit differently in terms of how we respond to customer signals and so on.

“Ultimately, this comes down to a closer partnership between us and the customers, because these best practices are so dependent on what the customer is trying to achieve and how we can help them best achieve that with the right resources in the right time.”