Green Operations Case Study: Amazon Web Services
In recent years, AWS has emerged as the leader in the cloud GreenOps space. AWS has embraced sustainability in its cloud operations to become the world’s largest purchaser of renewable energy.8 The company has 310 sustainable energy projects (134 wind and solar farms and 176 rooftop solar projects) worldwide across 19 countries that generate 15.7 GW of power annually.9 AWS aims to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.10
This overarching commitment to cloud sustainability and GreenOps is embodied in the AWS Sustainability Pillar, which is designed to:11
“[H]elp organizations learn, measure, and improve their workloads using environmental best practices for cloud computing…[T]he Sustainability Pillar contains questions aimed at evaluating the design, architecture, and implementation of your workloads to reduce their energy consumption and improve their efficiency. The pillar is designed as a tool to track your progress toward policies and best practices that support a more sustainable future, not just a simple checklist.”