In today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape, sustainability has become a critical concern for organisations across industries. As environmental awareness grows, businesses are seeking ways to reduce their carbon footprint while maintaining efficiency and performance. In this article we discuss sustainability and the impact of cloud computing.
In today’s world, delivering sustainable technology is no longer optional for organisations—it’s becoming mandatory. Both regulatory and moral obligations are pushing companies to adopt eco-friendly practices. As advocates for using Well-Architected and Serverless First principles, we believe they are not only the best way to build secure, cost-effective, reliable, and high-performing applications, but also the most sustainable approach to delivering long-term value.
Here are five key steps to help you move toward sustainable technology with serverless:
1. Measure Your Carbon Footprint
Understanding your current environmental impact is the first step to sustainability. Assess your carbon footprint to identify where inefficiencies exist. This allows you to set tangible goals for improvement and track progress over time. Tools like cloud provider carbon calculators (e.g., Google’s Carbon Footprint or Microsoft’s Sustainability Calculator) can provide insights into your emissions and help you reduce them.
2. Move to Public Cloud and Close Your Data Centers
Data centers require significant energy to operate, maintain, and cool. By moving your workloads to a public cloud, you benefit from the cloud provider’s optimized infrastructure, which is often powered by renewable energy. Closing down on-premise data centers can drastically reduce your environmental footprint, and many cloud providers offer more sustainable options than self-managed facilities.
3. Leverage Low-Carbon Regions
When deploying your applications, choose cloud regions that rely on low-carbon energy sources whenever possible. Keep in mind factors like data regulations, latency, and service availability, but wherever feasible, opt for regions that help lower your carbon emissions. Many cloud providers offer information on the sustainability levels of their regions, helping you make informed decisions.
4. Eliminate Waste with User-Centric Design
Efficiency is crucial for sustainability. By deeply understanding and meeting user needs without unnecessary complexity, you can reduce resource consumption. Focusing on minimalism in application design—building only what’s required—helps eliminate wasted resources, whether in terms of computing power, storage, or processing time.
5. Adopt a Serverless First Mindset
The serverless model is inherently sustainable because it operates on a pay-per-use basis, eliminating the need to run and maintain always-on servers. Serverless automatically scales resources based on demand, ensuring you use only what’s needed. This not only reduces costs but also minimizes energy waste, making it one of the most sustainable ways to run modern applications.
Sustainable technology guidelines
In addition to these steps, the UK Government’s Central Digital & Data Office has published valuable guidance on making technology more sustainable. Their framework includes 12 key questions that organisations should consider when aligning with sustainability goals, such as:
- What are your organisation’s sustainability goals?
- If the contract is more than £5 million per year, has the supplier committed to meet the government’s net zero target, and published a Carbon Reduction Plan? I would update this to: has your supplier committed to meet a net zero target, and published a Carbon Reduction Plan?
- Can you include specific project objectives to meet your organisation’s sustainability goals?
- Have you identified potential benefits for meeting sustainability objectives, or risks that would stop you meeting those objectives?
- Does your organisation have processes for recording and reporting on sustainability goals? For example, reporting on the targets for greenhouse gases, waste and water.
- Do your project plans include user research to more clearly define requirements and reduce the chance of buying software and hardware you do not need?
- Do you have a process or plan for recording the impact of future upgrades to software and hardware?
- Are you able to recycle or repurpose any equipment you are replacing?
- Are you able to use existing datasets for your project?
- Are there any opportunities for minimising processing, transmission and storage?
- Can you put in place processes which reduce printing and paper trails in back office systems and user facing services?
- Have you assessed whether home working is a practical and more sustainable option for your project team?
Comparing Compute Models: From Physical Hardware to Serverless
We want to breakdown the different models of compute in terms of carbon efficiency:
- Buying Physical Hardware: This is the least efficient option. You go to PC World, buy a box, bring it home, and run your workload—that’s the worst way to do it. Driving to the store, purchasing hardware, and running it at home creates unnecessary carbon emissions.
- EC2 Instances: Configuring an EC2 instance on AWS is more efficient than purchasing physical hardware, but there is still potential for resource wastage if the instance is underutilised.
- Containers in the Cloud: Containers offer more efficiency by sharing underlying resources, though they still require management and infrastructure.
- Serverless Computing: This is the most carbon-efficient model because resources are fully managed and optimised by the cloud provider. Serverless architecture reuses hardware across many customers, reducing idle time and maximising efficiency.
As organisations adopt cloud computing, moving towards serverless architecture offers a significant reduction in carbon emissions. AWS is 80% more efficient than on-premise data centres, and there’s an even bigger jump when moving to modern, serverless architectures.
Sustainability Through Reuse and Optimisation
Sustainability in cloud computing isn’t just about reducing energy consumption—it’s about maximising the reuse of resources. Serverless platforms optimise resource allocation, sharing hardware across multiple customers and workloads. This reduces the need for dedicated servers that sit idle when not in use, effectively cutting down carbon emissions.
But remember Jevons Paradox—the idea that as something becomes more efficient, its usage increases, potentially negating the gains in efficiency. We want to maximise the amount of work not done by focusing on the true need of a workload and avoiding unnecessary compute.
Government Standards and Competitive Advantage
Sustainability is not just a technical requirement but a strategic advantage. With governments increasingly introducing sustainability mandates, such as the UK government’s recent guidelines, organisations will need to answer key questions about their environmental impact. These mandates include reducing greenhouse gas emissions, optimising cloud usage, and auditing data for efficiency.
For companies that offer cloud solutions, there is a significant competitive advantage in providing low-carbon, sustainable options. If you’re a service provider building solutions for companies and can offer low-carbon options, that’s going to be a big selling point moving forward. We will see a push for sustainability driving more demand for serverless-first approaches as businesses aim to reduce their environmental impact.
A Sustainable Future with Well-Architected, Serverless Solutions
Teams already embracing serverless architecture are well-positioned to adopt any new carbon measurement tools introduced by cloud providers. This gives them a head start in answering crucial business questions about sustainability, environmental impact, and carbon footprint.
Moreover, as organisations refine their cloud practices, they can look beyond just optimising their tech stack and consider the broader business implications. If you take a holistic view of the value stream for a business, there are questions like, do all your developers need high-powered laptops, or could you use cloud IDEs instead?.
Ultimately, sustainability offers businesses not just an ethical imperative but a cost-effective and strategic one. Building solutions that are both efficient and environmentally responsible is not only possible but beneficial. It’s cheaper to build in a more sustainable way. We don’t understand why more people haven’t realised that.
Conclusion
The intersection of cloud computing and sustainability is becoming increasingly important as organisations strive to balance efficiency, cost, and environmental responsibility. Moving to a serverless-first approach offers a powerful solution to reducing carbon footprints while enhancing performance. With government standards evolving and competitive pressures mounting, companies that embrace sustainable solutions will be at the forefront of this shift, reaping both environmental and business benefits.
The future of cloud computing lies in well-architected, sustainable solutions, and serverless is leading the way.