In my previous blogpost I highlighted 3 ways to improve software sustainability by improving energy efficiency, hardware efficiency and carbon awareness. Let’s have a closer look, how you can further leverage the sustainable benefits of Azure.

Gartner predicts that in 2024, “60% of infrastructure and operations leaders will encounter cloud cost overruns.” The good news is there is still scope to reduce cost and CO2 production which I describe below.

1. Improve Hardware Efficiency by Containerization and Move from IaaS to PaaS

To rapidly realize the benefits of the cloud such as scale and cost effectiveness, many organizations perform a lift and shift approach. This should be seen as the start of the cloud journey, not the end. To further reduce expenditure and CO2 output, we should target Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions in the cloud such as Azure web apps, Azure SQL and Azure functions. While it may not be feasible to re-architect your application to take advantage of cloud native microservices, we can often make use of PaaS. Here are some examples of PaaS alternatives to IaaS.

One stepping-stone to PaaS, is to containerize your applications. PaaS services such as web apps and Azure functions support deployment using containers. Containers allow cloud service providers to optimize hardware efficiency. Monolithic containerized applications can still be scaled albeit not as efficiently as cloud native applications. This might be enough for your needs when aligned with your cloud strategy.

Together with the option of Azure serverless computing such as Azure functions, logic apps, event grid and Azure container instances, we can achieve yet more efficiencies with an on-demand consumption model. Here is an example of an efficiently designed system by using serverless computing.

2. Improve Energy Efficiency by Measuring and Optimizing

Your Azure landscape should be monitored for spend and CO2 output. This includes development, test and production environments. Tag your resources with meta data to ensure you can differentiate between multiple deployment environments. While the Azure portal has tooling to track spend, it does not natively support CO2 emissions. However, Microsoft does provide a power BI sustainability dashboard which details the CO2 emissions.

Once you have identified the most carbon intensive workloads, consider using different cloud services, optimizing the stock keeping units (SKUs). SKUs relate to attributes of the service such as performance, features and pricing. Investigate re-locating or time shifting the workload using the carbon aware SDK to where and when electricity is greenest.

Take Away Message

Organizations are increasingly focusing on sustainability in their business operations. Applying sustainable green software practices reduces your cloud spend and CO2 emissions. Avanade is a steering committee member of the green software foundation and contributes to the foundation’s projects.

We would be happy to help you optimize your cloud strategy and software sustainability.