With data centers only consuming around 1% of global electricity demand Technology departments have a substantial influence on the organization's sustainability goals.
However, significantly reducing the amount of energy used to run workloads and business processes requires intelligent automation, deep visibility, technology reduction in the shadow (secondary, no IT control) and CI/CD pipeline optimization (continuous integration and continuous deployment).
smart automation
The report State of FinOps 2021 revealed that the top issue for 39% of financial operations professionals is getting engineers to take action when cloud inefficiencies are identified. This inaction means that a great deal of money and energy is being wasted unnecessarily.
IT departments can achieve dramatic reductions in electricity use by leveraging intelligent automation and resource management. With an advanced automated alert and visualization system, developers and other stakeholders in the organization can always be informed of the environmental impact of the decisions they make.
For example, if a developer is provisioning a public cloud resource and a less power consuming option is available, they might receive a notification alerting them to the problem and suggesting the greener option.
Such a system could also take advantage of built-in security measures to automatically shut down idle resources that are no longer in use, such as zombie virtual machines, neglected development environments, and resources left running overnight and on weekends. When you don't have to manually chase people down to remind them to turn things off or check new commitments with spreadsheets, less energy is wasted and less carbon is burned.
visibility in detail
Lack of visibility is one of the most pressing challenges in optimizing multi-cloud and multi-tool environments and truly reaping their benefits.
Major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP provide visibility tools and even offer tools that allow companies to measure carbon usage. However, these tools are cloud-native, meaning they only work on that provider's products and services.
They can't see through other clouds, so you have to use a collection of different tools and analyze different data sets. You need to collect AWS data with AWS tools, Azure data with Azure tools, and so on. This needs to be done at regular intervals and is usually done manually using spreadsheets.
Even if the different teams responsible for collecting this data always do so on time and without error (which is highly unlikely), the data needs to be aggregated and analyzed. This is time consuming and often delayed and/or done randomly.
Having to search for improvements across multiple teams and departments to collect emissions data is not optimal. Rather, businesses need complete visibility across all clouds, tools, and platforms.
Visibility tools must interoperate with every cloud you're using, and data must be available from a single place where it can be easily viewed and analyzed. Data-driven insights gathered from company-wide performance monitoring tools can help quickly pinpoint problem areas, address inefficiencies, and show opportunities for improvement. Greater cloud efficiency results in greater sustainability.
reduce technology in the shadow
IT departments have a heavy workload and are not always able to resolve requests or issues as quickly as their internal customers would like. This often results in DevOps bypass IT and activate public cloud resources on your own to do your own thing. However, this leads to “Shadow Technology”, with virtual machines and applications running in the background without IT knowledge.
Shadow technology has long been a problem for organizations. Gartner estimates that shadow IT accounts for 30% to 40% of all organizational IT spend. It makes sense that an opaque collection of rogue cloud apps would also use a significant amount of power.
Many companies reduce or eliminate incentives to create shadow IT by implementing self-service IT. In a self-service environment, IT creates a pre-approved catalog of resources that developers and engineers can access for themselves through a single portal.
These resources can include storage, compute, networking, or multi-tier application stacks. Employees can get what they need on their own, when they need it.
IT can also place barriers on these resources, such as Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and permissions, usage quotas, and cost controls, significantly reducing inefficient resources and therefore , wasted energy. Without proper safeguards and RBAC in place, workloads can spiral out of control and increase an organization's carbon footprint.
Continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) optimization
Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) describes a development approach that enables code changes to be delivered frequently and reliably. The companies invest in CI/CD to reduce time to market by developing and delivering applications faster and more reliably. CI/CD accomplishes this by allowing frequent updates and fixes on an ad hoc basis.
However, many CI/CD performances are still hampered by unreliable testing and irregular problem detection; and manual processes limit speed and agility. This leads to IC/CD failures and process restarts and subsequently wasted energy and increased carbon footprints.
To optimize CI/CD to deliver on its business promises and dramatically reduce energy use and carbon emissions, companies must be able to proactively detect infrastructure problems in CI/CD performances, such as unexpected changes in configurations computing, storage, and networking, before they cause errors.
Without continuous infrastructure sandbox solutions, enterprises will be stuck in a reactive mode when it comes to troubleshooting CI/CD pipeline issues, decreasing pipeline efficiency and increasing energy consumption and waste.
The new cloud paradigm is green
Multicloud architectures will continue to grow in size and complexity, but the amount of carbon needed to power them doesn't have to be.
The steps outlined above are key to further advancing sustainability goals and reducing environmental impact.
We are all stewards of this planet and we have a role to play. As IT leads the way to a cloud-powered digital future, we can do so guided by sustainable business practices. The sum of many small changes will lead to the transformative improvements that need to be made.
