Jeff Kukowski
With data centers alone consuming around 1% of global electricity demand, IT departments have substantial influence on their organization’s sustainability goals.
Significantly reducing the amount of energy used to run workloads and business processes, however, requires intelligent automation, deep visibility, reducing shadow IT and optimizing CI/CD pipelines.
Intelligent automation
The State of FinOps 2021 report revealed that 39% of financial operations professionals’ number one problem is getting engineers to take action when cloud inefficiencies are identified. This inaction means a lot of money and energy is being wasted unnecessarily.
IT departments can make dramatic reductions in their use of electricity by leveraging intelligent automation and resource management. With an advanced, automated alert and visualization system, developers and other stakeholders across the organization can always be informed of the environmental impact of the decisions they make throughout their day.
For example, if a developer is provisioning a public cloud resource and a less energy-intensive option is available, they could receive a notification alerting them to the issue and suggesting the greener option.
Such a system could also leverage built-in guardrails to automatically turn off idle resources that are no longer in use, such as zombie VMs, 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 recommitments with spreadsheets, less energy is wasted and less carbon is burned.
Deep visibility
The lack of visibility is one of the most pressing challenges in optimizing mutlicloud, multitool environments and truly realizing their benefits.
Major cloud providers such as AWS, Azure and GCP provide visibility tools, and they even offer tools that enable enterprises to measure carbon usage. However, these tools are cloud-native, which means they only work on that vendor’s products and services.
They can’t see across other clouds, so you have to use a collection of different tools and analyze different data sets. You need to collect the AWS data with AWS tools, the Azure data with Azure tools, etc. This needs to be done at regular intervals, and it’s usually done manually with spreadsheets.
Even if the different teams responsible for collecting this data always do it on time and without error (which is highly unlikely), the data then needs to be aggregated and analyzed. This is time-consuming and often gets pushed back and/or done haphazardly.
Having to go on a scavenger hunt across multiple teams and departments to gather emissions data is not optimal. Rather, enterprises need to gain full 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 easily be viewed and analyzed. Data-driven insights gleaned from enterprisewide performance monitoring tools can help quickly point to problem areas, address inefficiencies and show opportunities for improvement. Greater cloud efficiency results in higher sustainability.
Reducing shadow IT
IT departments have a lot on their plate, and they can’t always resolve tickets as fast as their internal customers would like. This often results in DevOps bypassing IT and spinning up public cloud resources on their own to accomplish their tasks. However, this leads to “shadow IT,” with VMs and apps running in the background without IT’s knowledge.
Shadow IT has long been a problem for organizations. Gartner estimates that shadow IT accounts for 30%-40% of all enterprise IT spend. It makes sense that an opaque collection of unauthorized cloud applications will also use a significant amount of energy.
Many enterprises reduce or eliminate incentives for creating shadow IT by implementing self-service IT. In a self-serve environment, IT creates a preapproved catalog of resources that developers and engineers can access themselves through a single portal.
These resources might include storage, compute, networking or multitier app stacks. Employees can get what they need on their own, when they need them.
IT can also place guardrails on these resources, such as role-based access controls (RBAC) and permissions, usage quotas and cost controls, significantly reducing wasted resources and thereby wasted energy. Without proper guardrails and RBAC in place, workloads can spiral out of control and increase an organization’s carbon footprint.
Optimizing continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD)
Continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) describes an approach to development that enables code changes to be delivered frequently and reliably. Enterprises invest in CI/CD to decrease time to market by developing and delivering applications faster and more reliably. CI/CD accomplishes this by enabling frequent updates and fixes in an ad hoc manner.
However, many CI/CD pipelines are still hindered by unreliable testing and spotty issue detection; and manual processes limit speed and agility. This leads to failed CI/CD pipelines and process restarts, and subsequently, wasted energy and higher carbon footprints.
To optimize CI/CD so it delivers on its business promises and slashes energy use and carbon emissions, enterprises should be able to proactively detect CI/CD pipeline infrastructure issues, such as unexpected changes to compute, storage and network configurations, before they cause failures.
Without continuous infrastructure testing solutions, enterprises will be trapped in a reactive mode when it comes to fixing CI/CD pipeline issues, diminishing the pipeline’s effectiveness and increasing energy consumption and waste.
The new cloud order is green
Multicloud architectures are going to keep growing in size and complexity, but the amount of carbon required to power them doesn’t have to.
The steps outlined above are key to further advance sustainability goals and reduce environmental impact.
We are all stewards of this planet and have a role to play. As IT forges the path forward into a cloud-driven digital future, we can do so guided by sustainable business practices. The sum of many small changes will lead to the transformative improvements that must be made.
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