Insights

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.