What is GreenOps and where does it fit in with sustainability practice?

Most companies now are either actively moving towards true sustainability goals or investigating / planning to in the near future. Where FinOps was the newest topic that was being discussed up until recently to help support this, GreenOps is now also coming into the picture, but seems to be less well understood at this point.

What Is GreenOps?

GreenOps is an operating model that encompasses all actions/processes and practices to reduce the carbon footprint of the resources running on IT infrastructure. While it's becoming a more common term among businesses, but a lot of people I've spoken with recently aren't familiar with it and often their first question is "How does it fit in with things like sustainability, FinOps and carbon reduction initiatives"?

GreenOps generally has a wide scope. It can encompass everything that a business does to reduce the environmental footprint of their IT usage. Depending on the nature of the business it can cover areas as diverse as renewable energy usage, hardware and software usage, planning and strategy as well as forming advanced operational metrics and KPIs for business activities.

Specific actions that a business might take as part of a GreenOps practice are relocating resources to a region where renewable energy is used/available, shutting down resources during ‘idling time’ , creating energy optimised frameworks for workloads, and using cloud-native solutions as opposed to more traditional, but environmentally impacting solutions.

You'll notice several of these sound very similar to actions you might take as part of a FinOps approach as well...

Difference between GreenOps and FinOps

GreenOps certainly has some things in common with FinOps at a conceptual level. Both can provide operational frameworks and require a cultural shift within the business, one that must be aligned with your wider strategic goals and ESG ambitions. Both also involve several practices relating to efficiency, optimisation and sustainability

The difference between FinOps and GreenOps starts with the outcome they want to achieve. Fundamentally, FinOps focusses on cloud cost and resource optimization, while GreenOps is specifically focussed on reducing the carbon footprint of resources the business uses.?

However as you can probably tell by now (and perhaps somewhat confusingly), it's also possible to achieve both targets with the same set of actions!

So Improving your carbon footprint can be a side-effect of implementing FinOps. Also focussing on sustainability via GreenOps can also create a side-effect of improving sustainability.

Do you need to pick one or the other?

Both FinOps and GreenOps are continuing to grow significantly in importance as companies look for concrete ways to control cloud costs, deliver innovation, and contribute to ambitious sustainability-related goals.

To an extent both can 'just' be frameworks and best practice for achieving the goals that businesses want to. As with a lot of things, unless you have a very focussed and specific use case in mind, a good approach to start with is to treat both as a 'toolset' and select the best of what you need from both. That way you are using the overlap between the two models to your advantage, while retaining flexibility and the ability to adapt as both areas mature over time.