Sustainability alignment in cloud management

Introducing sustainability in your cloud management and operations help drive carbon awareness in your teams and ultimately work toward achieving your goals set up for your sustainability outcomes.

Monitoring carbon emissions

Utilize monitoring capabilities to understand better how your organization uses resources and help identify areas of improvement.

In the Azure Well-Architected Framework, we describe measuring and tracking carbon impact using the Emissions Impact Dashboard and Azure carbon optimization, defining emissions targets, identifying the metrics and setting improvement goals, using cost optimization as a proxy for carbon, and defining policies. To learn more, see operational procedure considerations for sustainable workloads on Azure.

Cost as a proxy for sustainability

While sustainability isn't usually the primary purpose of reducing service costs with tools like Azure Advisor, these tools can often be aligned with carbon savings. Consider cost as a proxy for sustainability, and see how an optimized workload becomes leaner and ultimately reduces the carbon footprint.

Find opportunities to schedule workloads

Part of your continuous operations and management of the cloud estate should be to evaluate what workloads you can schedule. For example, running batch workloads during low-carbon periods.

Monitor for services to retire

Understanding what services you're actively using and monitoring for unused resources can help you iteratively increase your cloud efficiency, lowering your carbon footprint.

Continuously managing your cloud estate is essential, including understanding what portions of your Azure resources aren't being used. An easy way to operationalize this is by using PowerShell to identify unassociated resources in Azure.

Remove unused data

Improve the sustainability of your IT operations by moving data to tape or a long-term archive. This offers insights into the "invisible sinks" within an organization. We can then also shift to quality from quantity.

To dive deeper, see Learn How Moving Data to Tape Can Lead to Significant Energy Savings and Reduction in CO2 Emissions.

Sustainability insights

When reporting on sustainability and cloud management, it's essential to consider internal and external stakeholders. Internally, you can share reports with relevant teams and management to raise awareness and promote accountability. Externally, customers, investors, or other stakeholders might request reports to evaluate the organization's sustainability and environmental impact.

By tracking and reporting on key metrics, organizations can promote transparency, accountability, and continuous sustainability and environmental impact improvement.

Emissions Impact Dashboard

In Azure, customers can use the Emissions Impact Dashboard to track and get insights on carbon emissions. This tool provides valuable insights into emissions by subscription, region, and service, allowing customers to understand their environmental impact better.

Customers can access information on emissions scopes, years, months, and other details, providing a comprehensive view of their emissions. This centralized tool can be valuable for large enterprises with complex cloud environments in tracking emissions accurately and efficiently.

Azure carbon optimization

Use Azure carbon optimization to measure and minimize the carbon impact of your Azure resources. With Carbon optimization, you can find opportunities to optimize resource utilization to lower carbon emissions and costs, track and analyze emissions associated with Azure resources and subscriptions, and access carbon data and insights through APIs and exports. Carbon optimization provides emission data for all Azure resource types, based on billing and usage.

Demand shaping

Demand shaping is a technique to optimize resource utilization by aligning demand with available resources. From a sustainability perspective, demand shaping can effectively reduce carbon emissions by ensuring that resources are used efficiently and effectively.

In a cloud environment, demand shaping typically involves identifying periods of low demand and scheduling resource-intensive workloads during those times. By doing so, organizations can take advantage of excess capacity and reduce the need to deploy more resources, which can help reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions.

From a management perspective, demand shaping requires careful planning and coordination. It's essential to have a clear understanding of resource utilization patterns and workload requirements and the ability to automate resource allocation and scheduling.