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14.3 Sustainable Cloud
A sustainable cloud strategy reduces money spent and carbon emitted at the same time. The levers - right-sizing, scheduling, region choice, architecture - are well understood and measurable. This lesson summarises the practical wins.
The Big Levers
| Lever | Carbon Win | Cost Win | Effort |
|---|---|---|---|
| Right-size compute | High | High | Low |
| Stop non-prod off-hours | Medium | High | Low |
| Use spot / preemptible | Medium | Very high | Medium |
| Pick low-carbon region | High | Neutral | Low |
| Refactor to serverless | Medium | Variable | High |
| Adopt Arm / Graviton | Medium | Medium | Medium |
| Storage tiering (hot to cold) | Low | High | Low |
| Right-size network egress | Low | High | Medium |
Measuring Cloud Carbon
| Provider | Tool | What It Reports |
|---|---|---|
| AWS | Customer Carbon Footprint Tool | tCO2e by service, region, month |
| Azure | Emissions Impact Dashboard | Scope 1-3 by service |
| GCP | Carbon Footprint | gCO2e by region and project |
| Multi-cloud | Cloud Carbon Footprint (OSS) | Estimates across AWS, GCP, Azure |
Quick Patterns That Pay Off
- Tag every workload with `owner`, `cost-center`, and `environment` from day one.
- Set a `sunset-date` tag on every non-prod resource - automation deletes when overdue.
- Default to **Singapore, Tokyo or Sydney** for PH workloads only when latency justifies it; consider regions with cleaner grids when the customer is global.
- Move logs older than 30 days to cold tier; archive at 90; delete at retention end.
- Treat unused volumes, idle load balancers, and orphan public IPs as monthly cleanup targets - they are the silent budget killers.
Sustainable Architecture Mindset
| Old Default | New Default |
|---|---|
| Provision for peak | Autoscale or burst |
| Always-on dev/test | Schedule off-hours |
| Monolithic DB cluster | Right-sized clusters per workload |
| Generic x86 SKUs | Latest gen + Arm where supported |
| Keep all logs forever | Retain only what is required |
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