Blogs
Date 04 April 2024
Can enterprises become environmentally sustainable (GreenOps) whilst also being economically sustainable (FinOps)? And does one necessarily beget the other? A few things to consider:
- Data centres account for around 2.5-3.7% of global GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions
- This is greater than that from the aviation industry - 2.4%!
- For cloud compute:
- RAM is the predominant scaling factor for cost
- CPU is the predominant scaling factor for energy
- Compiled languages can be significantly more CPU and energy efficient than interpreted languages at run-time
- Similarly, consider the recent kerfuffle about single monolithic in-memory processes v microservices
- Consideration of the carbon cost of manufacture is equally as important as running costs:
- Server: ~20% of lifetime carbon cost is manufacturing
- Laptop: ~80% of lifetime carbon cost is manufacturing
These are just some of the observations behind why GreenOps is rising in the market consciousness. As with all attempts to derive a quantitative figure for the environmental impact of an activity – be it going on vacation at home or abroad, taking the train instead of driving, buying an electric car or even running enterprise IT in the cloud – any such proposed methodology can and will be contested as being deficient in some way, depending on differing motivations.
To effect real change, it may be easier, and perhaps even more important, to build consensus around the awareness of the qualitative impact that different approaches and activities may have – do not let perfection be the enemy of the good.
Also worth having a look at some of our recent case studies where we have saved our clients Millions of pounds in cloud spend.
About the author
Team Capacitas
FinOps and AI: Building the Financial Discipline for the Next Wave of Enterprise Intelligence
AI FinOps represents an evolution rather than a replacement of traditional FinOps. It extends the model into a domain where financial, technical, and product decisions are tightly interconnected.
Confidence Under Load: How We Verified AKS Readiness for Peak
How Capacitas verified AKS readiness for peak demand by validating workload performance, autoscaling, cluster capacity, monitoring, and incident response.
Building Cloud Resilience: Lessons from the AWS Outage
Learning from the Latest Outage. Events like this week’s AWS disruption highlight one clear truth: resilience must be designed, not assumed.
Bringing Order to Chaos: A Practical Guide to Chaos Testing in the Cloud
In today’s cloud-native environments, resilience is not optional—it’s critical. Chaos testing has emerged as a key practice for validating system behaviour under failure conditions.
