Carbon Footprint Tool in real-time

Hi Svetlana,

To evaluate if changes to your infrastructure have made carbon emissions improvements, I recommend that you use proxy metrics. By doing so, you can make configuration, architectural, or code changes and see the results right away. A proxy metrics is an alternative metric than MTCO2e (Metric Tons of CO2 equivalent) that represents carbon emissions. For example, knowing that storing a gigabyte of data creates carbon emissions, you could then track if your gigabytes of storage are increasing or decreasing after your changes.

We recommend normalizing proxy metrics to make them comparable. For example, EC2 instance hours do not all represent the same carbon emissions because EC2 instances can vary in the number of processor cores (and therefore energy consumption). So, you could track vCPU-hours instead of EC2 instance hours. If you ran a 16-core EC2 instance for one hour, that's 16 vCPU-hours. Then, you can more equitably compare usage when you have various EC2 instances sizes in your fleet.

Here's another suggestion for tracking your progress towards sustainability goals. Let's say that you want to use more AWS Graviton processors because they are more energy-efficient. You could track a metric like Graviton vCPU-hours / Total vCPU-hours. Then, as you adopt more Graviton instances, you can see the increase in Graviton usage relative to your entire fleet of EC2 instances.

One of the most important things you can do is to add a business metric to your proxy metrics. An example of a business metric could be "number of customer orders." For instance, you could track the number of megabytes created per customer order. As you become more efficient and create less data per customer order, you'll be able to validate that quickly with a metric like this. As your business grows, you may use more, overall resources so including a business metric will show if you are actually becoming more or less efficient.

Here's a good blog on using proxy metrics. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/measure-and-track-cloud-efficiency-with-sustainability-proxy-metrics-part-i-what-are-proxy-metrics/

I hope this is helpful,

Richard

Thanks very much. This is interesting way to anyalyze usage. I will explore more and have lots of questions on this tool. Will footprint tool show more detail in the future to show real time emisions?

Hi Svetlana,

I recommend checking back periodically for further updates.

Here's a recent example showing that MTCO2e measurements are now available in smaller increments.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/increased-visibility-of-your-carbon-emissions-data-with-aws-customer-carbon-footprint-tool

You can keep up with AWS sustainability blogs and new AWS announcements at the links below:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/tag/sustainability/ https://aws.amazon.com/new

Best,

-Richard