Strategies for Achieving Carbon Neutrality and Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions on AWS

Strategies for Achieving Carbon Neutrality and Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions on AWS

Amazon’s commitment to sustainability and carbon neutrality has helped ensure Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the world’s most sustainable cloud service providers.

Moving to AWS is one of the most efficient ways to ensure your business can reduce its carbon footprint. Discover the most efficient carbon neutrality strategies on AWS and how to implement them.

Workload Efficiency Optimisation
Numerous AWS services and features are designed to help you optimise your business’s resource utilisation, such as AWS EC2 Auto Scaling. You can also opt for serverless cloud computing solutions like AWS Lambda, reducing costs and resource usage by only paying for the code compute time.

Businesses using resource scaling, optimisation, and serverless computing can reduce their environmental impact. These solutions can lower your organisation’s carbon and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, reduce overall energy consumption, and boost cost-effectiveness.

Selecting a Carbon-Free Region
AWS cloud services is divided into various geographic regions. While many other factors can affect your region choices, such as regulatory compliance, latency, and costs, choosing an AWS region that meets your sustainability goals is possible.

AWS offers multiple carbon-free regions, where data centres receive at least 95% of their power from renewable energy sources. Examples of highly sustainable AWS regions include the following:

● U.S. East: Northern Virginia and Ohio
● U.S. West: Northern California and Oregon
● GovCloud: US-East and US-West
● Canada (Central)
● Europe: Ireland, Frankfurt, London, Milan, Paris, Stockholm

Remember to check the AWS region you selected has the services and features you need to run your workloads. You can use the complete AWS Regional Services Lists to help you make the right choice.

Building Sustainable, Energy-Efficient Applications
Although simply migrating to AWS can help your business become more energy efficient, Amazon recommends following all aspects of the Sustainability pillar of its Well-Architected Framework for the best results.

One of the essential design principles of sustainability is “Understand your impact”. Tools such as the AWS Custom Carbon Footprint Tool are designed to let you track, measure, review, and predict your AWS usage’s carbon footprint. This tool’s information is invaluable to help you build more sustainable and energy-efficient applications.

Using Amazon instance types with the lowest environmental impact can also help reduce your applications’ carbon footprint. For example, consider transitioning away from x86-based EC2 instances in favour of AWS Graviton equivalents. These instances are powered using the energy-efficient Graviton2 and Graviton3 processors, designed to minimise energy consumption for the same or better performance.

Improve Your Company’s Sustainability Goals with WOLK
WOLK Technology offers tailored IT solutions to help your business meet your operational goals sustainably. We are a certified AWS Well-Architected Program partner with the resources to help you become compliant with the AWS Sustainability pillar. Contact us today to learn more.