The client
Clevergy is a Spanish startup that brings energy consumption transparency to consumers through digital technology. Their mission is to promote a cleaner and greener environment by reducing carbon emissions and promoting the use of renewable energy sources. As a company that values sustainability, they wanted to ensure their cloud infrastructure resources were also operating efficiently.
The challenge
Clevergy’s mission is to help people save energy and save the planet. If a company with this mission cannot understand how they are impacting carbon emissions, they cannot achieve their objectives. As a company that relies on cloud infrastructure, Clevergy wanted to measure the carbon emissions and energy consumption of their cloud resources to ensure they were operating consciously while doing business. However, they lacked a proper tool to help them monitor their cloud infrastructure's carbon footprint and energy consumption.
The solution
Clevergy partnered with Thoughtworks to implement and deploy the Cloud Carbon Footprint (CCF) tool to help them measure and monitor their Google Cloud Platform (GCP) infrastructure's carbon emissions and energy consumption.
The CCF tool is a cloud-agnostic, free and open-source tool that utilizes cloud usage data to provide insights into carbon emissions, energy consumption, and efficiency of cloud resources. Its cloud-agnostic nature enables compatibility with any cloud provider, regardless of their specific infrastructure environment.
Thoughtworks implemented and configured this solution, ensuring it was customized to Clevergy’s specific cloud infrastructure environment. The tool showed interesting results in terms of their own metrics.
These were the first results we got with the tool:
Once the results were known, it was time to interpret them and start acting.
The game plan
First and foremost, we began by interpreting the data. Despite the low volume of emissions at Clevergy, they still wanted to reduce the numbers further and contribute their share. The results clearly indicated the majority of the emissions (56.82%) originate from Cloud Dataflow, which is Google's streaming service.
During the analyzed period, they used this service to transfer their events from Pub/Sub to BigQuery. However, thanks to the remarkable range of features offered by GCP in their services, they discovered that by doing some refactoring, they could directly write to BigQuery from Pub/Sub using a special push subscription provided by GCP.
They devised a plan and commenced throttling the streaming service until it was completely phased out.
Still handling millions of daily requests to their API, the results obtained were the following, reducing CO2e emissions from 0.023 metric tons to 0.0018 metric tons, representing a 92% reduction in their already efficient architecture.
The outcomes
The deployment and configuration of the CCF tool with Thoughtworks has allowed Clevergy to gain visibility into the sustainability metrics of their cloud infrastructure resources. They can now monitor their carbon emissions and energy consumption in real-time, promoting sustainability in their own tooling and practices just as much as with their products and services.
It’s also a great way to save money. The more resources used, the simpler the architecture and the smaller the bill.
The CCF tool enables Clevergy to make data-driven decisions as they scale their user base and digital infrastructure accordingly. From now on, this tool can monitor their cloud provider in real-time and make agile decisions.
We are so proud that our collaboration with Thoughtworks, GCP, and The Cloud Carbon Footprint tool reaffirmed that we are doing all we can to reduce our own carbon footprint while helping our users to do the same.
