Achieving Sustainability Goals in AWS

Climate change is the defining issue of our time. It's caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and its effects are being felt worldwide. It's a planetary problem—and it will be felt for many years to come.

AWS has larger number of customers that include companies of all sizes in nearly every industry around the world
and they believes that they can help accelerate the adoption of sustainable energy for our planet. In 2000, AWS became one of the first companies in the industry to adopt a comprehensive approach to environmental stewardship, setting goals and guidelines for energy efficiency and carbon neutrality at each step along its supply chain process.

Today, AWS has taken many initiatives including Wind Farm Project in Ireland and US East in Ohio—which uses wind power to drive cloud-based services for customers data center.
AWS is on track to power their operations entirely with renewable energy by 2025, which will help various businesses in achieving environmental sustainability goals.However, this is not sufficient.

Shared responsibility model for environmental sustainability

Source: AWS documentation

AWS has data centers around the world. They are run by electricity. Electrical energy could be produced from renewable sources like solar or wind power. There are servers in data centers. They must be chilled. Water can be refreshing at times. There will be leftovers. There will be construction supplies. In essence, AWS is responsible for numerous areas within AWS and carefully examines how they are sustainable.

On the other hand, customers are responsible for sustainability for what they're doing in the cloud. AWS doesn't have control on it. Understanding the implications of the services used, measuring affects over the whole workload lifecycle, and using design principles and best practices to minimize these impacts are all part of the discipline of building cloud workloads.

AWS announced the Sustainability Pillar in re:Invent 2021 to help customers in minimizing the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads. It is available in the AWS-Well-Architected tool, which contains design principles, operational guidance, and best practices for meeting sustainability goals.

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol categorize carbon emissions into three major scopes:

All direct emissions from the activities of an organization eg:- fuel combustion by data center backup generators.
Indirect emissions from electricity purchased and used to power data centers and other facilities eg:- emissions from commercial power generation.
All other indirect emissions from activities of an organization from sources it doesn’t control (Customer's responsibility) eg:- Each workload deployed generates a fraction of the total AWS emissions

How can we optimize our workloads to reach our sustainability goals?

In order to reduce the amount of physical hardware, electricity, and carbon emissions that our workload actually produces, what we want to do is use the least amount of virtual hardware possible. Also we need to make sure to use the best and suitable technology.
AWS is always improving their existing services and introducing new ones in order to meet a variety of goals that customers want to achieve, including sustainability. Attending to re:Invent, reading AWS documentation, and following blogs can help you stay updated.

There are three major areas we could examine when discussing workloads.
Those are:

Computing
Storage
Networking.

First up, with compute services, we want to optimize the compute size, the instant size, the number of containers, and ultimately the number of instances that you're actually using to serve your end users. But the number of instances/containers should change over time based on usage, this means that when you don't need a certain amount of compute power, containers, or instances, it should automatically reduced in size. In other words, the main objective is to lowering the amount of compute required per transaction.

Some of the Design Principals for Compute:

Right sizing
Eliminate the idle resources
Using ARM processors instead of Intel(eg:-AWS Graviton processors)
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Containerize the workloads to achieve maximize server utilization
Use Serverless services(eg:- Fargate, Lambda)

There are certain design principles you may use to keep your data in a sustainable manner.

Some of the Design Principals for storage:

Use S3 lifecycle rules
Use Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering
Use columnar data formats and compression(Columnar data formats like Parquet and ORC when applicable)
Use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to delete old EBS snapshots and Amazon EBS-backed Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) automatically.
Turning on data deduplication for your Amazon FSx for Windows File Server

When it comes to network optimization, it is primarily about optimizing the path data takes across a network and reducing the size of data transmitted.

Some of the Design Principals for Networking:

Using CDN network to reduce the network path( eg:-CloudFront)
Optimize CloudFront cache hit ratio
If workload is deploying only on a single region, choose a Region that is near the majority of your users
If your users are spread over multiple Regions, set up multiple copies of the data to reside in each Region. (eg:- RDS cross-Region read replicas and DynamoDB global tables)
Serve compressed files(eg:-configure CloudFront to automatically compress objects)
Use Edge-optimized API endpoints for geographically distributed clients

It's crucial to keep in mind that optimizing is a journey, not a single task. Although it's a journey, businesses can progress more faster toward their sustainability goals by putting the design principles recommended by the AWS Well-Architected framework into practice. Moreover, AWS has launched the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, which allows you to track carbon emissions from your workload and make proactive decisions to reduce carbon emissions. It is also essential to look at Cloudwatch Metrics and AWS Trusted Advisor to analyze and optimize your workloads.

AWS commissioned 451 Research, a technology market research and advisory business, to undertake a study on the energy and carbon efficiency of enterprise data centers and server architecture to assess the environmental benefits for enterprises shifting to its public cloud infrastructure.
According to the Amazon Sustainability webpage, it says that "AWS can lower customers’ workload carbon footprints by nearly 80% compared to surveyed enterprise data centers, and up to 96% once AWS is powered with 100% renewable energy".

You can always compare how much your carbon footprint has decreased after switching from on-premises data centers to AWS using the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool. If you haven't considered sustainability yet, now is the time to do so in order to saving earth and future generations. If you are ready, Versent can help you in this journey(Green Brick Road), by working with your ICT team to examine and assess your ICT estate, procedures, and capabilities and align them to sustainability best practices.