The Clouds are Green - are you?

"We're all a part of this amazing planet, but we're changing it like never before."

Sir David Attenborough's voice has been enthralling our nature-loving hearts and minds since the early 1950s, but his legacy may now be far greater than just a record TV career; his show Our Planet has focused so heavily on the changes humans have inflicted on this great green earth we call home people are keen to take action in support of green initiatives and throw out the old, unsustainable ways of living.

"When David Attenborough issued a call to action to combat plastic waste in the second series of Planet Earth II, searches for “plastic recycling” saw a dramatic uplift of 55% in the UK. But the galvanizing impact of Attenborough’s words extended far beyond viewers of the show, and indeed the UK. Clutching at discarded plastic items retrieved from the ocean, his comments came after traumatic scenes showing the poisonous effects of plastic waste on marine wildlife. This was enough to set off what many have coined the Attenborough effect: a chain of events which have resulted in the so-called War on Plastic Waste and the wider social movement surrounding it." - Global Web Index

"This is the new extinction and we are half way through it. We are in terrible, terrible trouble and the longer we wait to do something about it the worse it is going to get" - David Attenborough

This is why I'm glad we picked AWS as Cloud hosting partner. Their excellent green credentials, and the efforts they’re going to creating a better, greener more sustainable world means they exceeded 50% renewable energy usage for 2018.

So how can you do something about it?

When analysing datacentres for their climate impact, you should consider the power sources, their relative efficiencies and your resource utilisation too. This broadly breaks down into 3 categories for Carbon Emissions: The number of servers running, the energy they use and how 'green' the energy source is that's used.

AWS researched the typical large-scale cloud providers, comparing them to running the same server utilisation on-premises. They found cloud providers can achieve about 65% server utilisation vs 15% for on-premises - that's a pretty sizeable chunk of resources that can be saved right there - often just 25% of the servers operating at any one time compared to on-premises solutions. Plus, on-premise datacentres are often unable to take advantage of the modern, shared design efficiencies found in the cloud, they can be 29% less energy efficient too. Serverless frameworked services can provide much of the compute resources for software operations without the overheads of individual servers to run each of them.

An amazing 84% reduction in the amount of power required is found by using fewer servers, plus taking advantage of newer more power efficient servers technologies.

We're all a part of this amazing planet, but we're changing it like never before. - David Attenborough

And the effect is?

Being able to offer efficient datacentres, and be part of driving huge reductions in climate impact, means when we extol our green credentials, we can be confident in helping our customer meet their targets for reducing their carbon footprint. As their impact on the world decreases, and the more they promote their green policies and achievements the more they can ride the 'Attenborough Effect' in today's very switched on, clued up and aspirational markets.

Do you agree that moving to the cloud can unlock shared efficiencies and access to more readily available green power? Do you think it's an issue for your company? Do you think it should be?

Comments are free, my eyes and ears are open. I welcome your thoughts!