An alternative to traditional models of computing, many businesses are turning to cloud-computing for on-demand access to a variety of IT services such as data storage, networking and software.
With cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform offering access to the necessary resources on a pay-as-you-go basis, businesses no longer need to invest in buying and maintaining physical infrastructure and can reduce costs by buying less hardware and using servers located elsewhere to store, manage and process data.
Not only does cloud-computing offer many benefits from a technological and financial perspective, but it also offers benefits from an environmental perspective as serverless technology allows you to run complete applications without the need to run your own servers, further reducing cost and emissions, making it an ideal solution for developers and technical teams who want to build applications that have a minimal carbon footprint.
Whereas computing’s carbon emissions account for a significant proportion of global greenhouse gas footprint (with data centres making up the largest share of this), cloudcomputing can significantly reduce your carbon footprint by taking advantage of shared resources such as networking, power, cooling and physical facilities and cloud providers are increasingly sourcing their energy from renewable sources, in fact AWS became the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in 2020.
Better utilisation rate
Traditionally, businesses have used more servers than they need to reduce the risk of downtime during periods of high demand. This has resulted in on-premise infrastructure having a low utilisation rate due to using very little of the available capacity. However, since cloud providers can host thousands of businesses with different usage patterns that balance each other out, they can more accurately predict usage requirements. This enables cloud providers to eliminate or minimise idle resources, processing and storage, reducing the energy required to power your application.
Faster hardware refresh speed
Typically, companies with on-premise infrastructure tend to use their hardware for longer periods of time before an upgrade or replacement since their utilisation rates are lower resulting in a longer life cycle, not to mention the time and cost associated with upgrading. Whereas cloud providers are more likely to refresh hardware more frequently due to their higher utilisation rates and because investing in new technology brings better energy efficiencies, meaning your applications will be running on the most energy efficient hardware, using much less energy in the long run.
Reduced electricity means less CO2
If you’ve already made the jump to the cloud, further savings can be made in the way your products make use of cloud infrastructure. Cloud-computing offers a platform that technologists can utilise to reduce costs and the amount of CO2 that is produced to power the infrastructure your products consume, but savings can be made in a number of areas such as scaling the number of servers you need to match demand, identifying where workloads could be moved to serverless technology that operate on a pay-peruse model and optimising software to run quicker, using less power, on the cloud infrastructure. Together these can make significant cost reductions in both monetary value and the CO2 produced.