Building greener and cheaper in AWS – Sustainable cloud could cost less than you think

Sustainability has become a big issue for organisations running workloads in the cloud. Energy use is rising, data centres are under increasing scrutiny, and businesses are facing growing pressure – from customers, regulators and their own boards – to demonstrate responsible use.

We all want to do the right thing, but sometimes doing the right thing is expensive. Or is it?

What’s often missed is that sustainability in the cloud is rarely about doing more. In fact, it’s usually about doing less. Which is a good thing. Because often the same decisions that reduce environmental impact can also help you save money in the cloud too.

And that makes sustainability much less of a trade-off than many businesses think it is.

A shared responsibility

Cloud providers like AWS invest heavily in efficient infrastructure. Whether it’s energy-efficient data centres or low-carbon energy, those decisions all contribute to the sustainability of the cloud.

And for your business, that part is easy, because it’s the cloud provider’s responsibility.

But how sustainably the cloud is used is largely down to you, the customer. Choices around architecture, data storage, scaling and day-to-day operations all influence how much compute and storage is used, and for how long.

This shared responsibility model means that organisations have far more control over their cloud footprint than they might assume. But that shouldn’t be intimidating. It means that meaningful improvements are often within reach.

Start with the biggest wins

When you’re thinking about optimising for sustainability, you might think you need to jump straight to complex solutions. But in reality, the biggest gains usually come from simple actions.

Things like right-sizing workloads, switching off resources that aren’t being used, and applying sensible lifecycle policies to storage can have an immediate, significant impact. In our experience, these basic hygiene activities are often overlooked, especially in environments that have grown quickly or changed hands over time.

Compute choice also plays a role. Different instance and processor types can offer different performance and energy characteristics. And being aware of these options can improve efficiency without changing application performance or behaviour.

For example, AWS Graviton-based instances are designed to deliver strong performance per watt, making them a useful option to consider when reviewing efficiency and cost.

Make choices that reduce waste by design

Sustainability improvements can be achieved just by making the right cloud architecture choices.

Auto scaling, for example, allows platforms to respond to real demand instead of running at peak capacity all the time. Containers and serverless services can improve utilisation by sharing underlying resources more effectively. And event-driven and batch-based approaches help ensure workloads run only when they need to.

All these patterns share something in common. They’re about aligning resource use with actual business need. When systems scale up and down intelligently, they tend to consume less energy overall and cost less to operate.

Get a handle on your data

Data can be easy to overlook, but hard to rein in once it starts growing.

Backups, snapshots and logs are often created automatically, then retained indefinitely. Over time, this can create a large and unnecessary storage footprint – increasing both cost and environmental impact without delivering any value.

Clear data lifecycle policies can help protect against this. So too can choosing the right storage tier for the job, rather than defaulting to high-performance options for long-term retention.

When data is treated as something to be actively managed, sustainability and cost savings tend to follow.

Take a practical view of AI

You’ve probably read countless articles and reports about the sustainability impact of AI. It’s an area of real concern, and rightly so. Training and running large models can be energy intensive, and the impacts can be felt on the planet and your wallet too.

The key principle to remember here is proportionality. Not every use case requires the largest or most complex model available. In many cases, existing models, retrieval-based approaches, or narrowly scoped solutions can meet business needs with far lower cost and energy consumption.

Being clear about the problem you’re trying to solve – before selecting a model or approach – helps avoid unnecessary experimentation and wasted resource.

Measure what matters

Visibility is essential if sustainability efforts are going to translate into real change.

Cloud-native tools can provide insight into resource usage, utilisation trends and carbon emissions over time. While not every metric maps directly to energy consumption, tracking patterns in compute, storage and network usage will help you highlight where improvements will have the greatest effect.

Measurement helps teams focus effort where it will make a meaningful difference, rather than spreading attention too thinly.

Sustainable cloud is usually well-designed cloud

The idea that sustainable cloud platforms are more expensive or harder to run doesn’t really hold up. In most cases, the opposite is true.

Well-designed architectures tend to be more efficient, more resilient and cheaper to operate. Sustainability comes from making good choices and focusing on the areas that matter most.

If you’re already thinking about cost control, performance or resilience, you’re likely closer to building for sustainability than you think. Because the same principles apply.

At Zen, this way of thinking underpins how we help organisations design, review and optimise their cloud environments – improving efficiency, cost and sustainability together.

Find out more about cloud services from Zen, and how we can help you build greener and cheaper in AWS.