Surprisingly, the tech sector is responsible for around the same volume of carbon emissions as the aviation industry. Cloud computing relies on large data centers and data transmission networks, making it one of the leading sources of energy and carbon emissions in tech. Aiven, alongside Thoughtworks, is driving a vision to tackle this issue head-on.
Aiven: All-in-one data platform in the cloud
Aiven is a global open-source data platform company, helping organizations drive more value from their data. As a trusted foundation to power innovation, Aiven’s all-inclusive cloud data platform combines the tools to stream, manage and analyze data simply, securely, and rapidly. Aiven is trusted by customers globally to create applications with confidence.
A strategic commitment to climate
Aiven is committed to mapping and minimizing its own environmental footprint – and wants to go much further. As stated in Aiven’s climate strategy, it wants to make the carbon emissions of cloud assets visible and better understood and help its clients to reduce them.
The first steps on this journey include collecting baseline data for its CO2 emissions, and tracking its share of renewable energy use so it can set targets and minimize environmental impact. But Aiven recognizes this is only half the solution.
Aiven also wants to assist its customers and other organizations to reach their environmental sustainability goals by helping them to understand the environmental impact of their use of Aiven services, and highlighting how they can reduce their environmental footprint by, for example, optimizing energy sources by cloud vendor/region and reducing overconsumption.
The ability to execute quickly and leverage the possibilities of data are requirements for success for our customers. We also want to equip them with the tools to do this sustainably.
Partnering to combine intelligent technology and sustainability
Thoughtworks has a strong track record in Cleantech & Sustainability, with expertise in renewable energy consulting, energy utilities, UN climate change activities, cleantech financial modeling and cleantech startups.
Additionally, Thoughtworks is a founding partner of the Green Software Foundation, a non-profit focused on establishing a trustworthy ecosystem for green software development. As a key contributor to the Cloud Carbon Footprint tool, Thoughtworks brings domain expertise in sustainability and transparent technical proficiency in carbon footprint calculation, making us the preferred sustainability partner for Aiven.
Building the foundation
Thoughtworks applied the expertise accumulated from the Cloud Carbon Footprint project to validate Aiven’s methodology for measuring and calculating cloud asset emissions, before giving recommendations on how to develop the methodology further.
The team helped identify the fundamental differences between the emission calculations provided by Aiven’s own methodology and those provided by the major cloud providers – Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.
We collaborated to define methodology and parameters for emission calculations for new hardware and cloud provider regions. These joint efforts laid the foundation to enable Aiven and its customers to collectively reach their strategic climate goals.
As both Aiven and Thoughtworks have a commitment to open source deep in their core, many of the results achieved so far are being published as open source via the Cloud Carbon Footprint project so that anyone can benefit from them and contribute to improving them. This enhances the robustness, credibility and transparency of the methodology.
Impactful results of the cooperation
Aiven and its customers are now equipped with the following capabilities:
- Accurately calculate cloud emissions and energy use of Aiven services
- Allow users to visualize the environmental impact of the different cloud infrastructure solutions offered
- Enable users to make informed decisions on service use, taking climate-related metrics into account
Further information
Cloud Carbon Footprint provides visibility and tooling to measure, monitor and reduce your cloud carbon emissions. It uses best practice methodologies to convert cloud utilization into estimated energy usage and carbon emissions, producing metrics and carbon savings estimates that can be shared with employees, investors, and other stakeholders.
Cloud Carbon Footprint is an open source tool which originated at Thoughtworks and Thoughtworks is a key contributor to the project.
The mission of the Green Software Foundation is to build a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and best practices for building green software.
The Green Software Foundation aims to change the culture of building software, so sustainability becomes a core priority for software teams, alongside performance, security, cost and accessibility.
In the big picture, this boosts the contribution of the software industry to the ICT sector’s broader ambitions for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030, in line with the Paris Climate Agreement.
Thoughtworks is a co-founding member of the Green Software Foundation and one of the steering partners.
