Azure Sustainability: Boosting Energy and Carbon Efficiency

They are all focusing this week at the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, on how to track our progress, create markets, and enable people throughout the world to create an equitable and sustainable future for all, like Azure Sustainability.

Everyone must work together to address and combat climate change at this important moment. It’s a significant occasion for Microsoft as well since we’ll provide sustainability solutions for operational and environmental impact and promote the societal framework for a sustainable world. They’ll also showcase our efforts to improve the sustainability of your business.

The customer message is loud and clear: sustainability is now an important business factor. In a poll of more than 1,230 corporate executives from 113 countries, 81% of CEOs reported increasing their investments in sustainability. For the first time, sustainability is among the top 10 business priorities, and by 2025, carbon emissions are expected to rank among the top three factors when choosing a cloud provider. Since December 2020, there have been twice as many large cities with net zero targets—from 115 to 235—and the global market for green data centers is expected to reach more than $181.9B by 2026.

Customers and partners are seeking assistance to understand how to comply with and plan for the quickly changing sustainability standards, incentives, and laws. They have to contend with both an unstable economic climate and growing energy expenses at the same time. They’re getting specific inquiries about developing sustainable IT in the cloud, like how to cut down on current energy use, expenses, and emissions. How many switching to the cloud help our efforts to increase productivity? What resources are available to ease this?

They are announcing technical assistance and skilling offerings that can assist you in planning your plan of action, improving your sustainability posture, and generating new business value while minimizing your operational footprint to assist you in navigating this learning curve. And this is only the beginning; in the months to come, there will be more announcements.

Use Azure to enhance your sustainability progress

Closing the Sustainability Skills Gap: Helping Businesses Move from Pledges to Progress, a recent On the Issues blog, focuses on the importance of providing businesses and people with a wide range of new skills to enable sustainable transformation. To help you achieve your sustainability goals with Azure, they are investing across the organization to support this skill development in a variety of ways, including a wide range of technical guidance and skilling efforts. To assist you in getting started, they are announcing a set of architectural guide resources this week:

• Azure Well-Architected Framework sustainability guidance: This documentation set, which builds on the Green Software Foundation’s industry expertise and is in line with their green software principles, describes workload optimizations for green IT within Azure. They approach the subject as a lens across workloads rather than a separate pillar since sustainability considerations apply to all five pillars: security, reliability, operational excellence, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.
• Azure Well-Architected Framework sustainability self-assessment: Use this self-assessment to examine the possible effects of your design choices and how to improve them for carbon and energy efficiency as you plan your cloud workloads. Also, whether you’re developing a new application, deploying an existing one, or reviewing an existing one, you’ll get actionable recommendations.
• Sustainable software engineering practices in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): The advice in this post contains design and configuration checklists, and suggested design and configuration options, and is targeted toward the AKS services you’re developing or running. It suggests analyzing the priorities, requirements, and trade-offs of your application before implementing sustainable software engineering concepts.

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Supporting your sustainability journey in the cloud

At each stage of the cloud journey, from moving to the cloud to reduce energy, carbon, and infrastructure costs, to optimizing in the cloud to achieve operational excellence, to reinvesting savings in new initiatives that will provide long-term business value, customers and partners can compound their benefits with Azure.

By following the principles and practices in the Cloud Adoption Framework and the Well-Architected Framework, businesses across all industries are optimizing their cloud investments. Also, they are attaining market leadership through reinvesting to stimulate innovation. Vasakronan, the largest real estate company in Sweden and a pioneer in sustainability, adopted an IoT and Digital Twins solution utilizing Azure and anticipates saving six million kronor (USD 700,000) per year on energy costs alone.

This Azure guideline complements products like Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability and Emissions Impact Dashboard for Microsoft cloud services as part of Microsoft’s continued commitment to support sustainable development and low-carbon business practices globally. To create, maintain, and advance best practices for green IT and innovation that support resilient, successful, and just economies, they’ll keep collaborating with customers, partners, and experts in the industry, like the Green Software Foundation. From a top training provider in the market:

“This is the missing ingredient in our business; it gives purpose and meaning. If you could put an overlay on your environment or applications and say here are 20 recommendations to make it optimally sustainable, reduce carbon emissions, give the data so you can make incremental improvements over the years, and manage it—that’s huge!”— Todd Fine, Chief Strategy Officer, Atmosera.

Whether you’re developing cloud-native applications, working in hybrid environments, or assessing options for organization-wide emissions reporting, the goal is to meet you where you are and help you do more with less as we continue to develop guidance to help out customers achieve their sustainability goals using Azure.

Driving sustainability skilling across your organization

According to research, cloud skilling programs can hasten success in the cloud also while improving business outcomes and personal career advancement. To help your teams and individuals understand how they may support the sustainability goals of their organization while developing highly useful skills and knowledge, we’ve created a series of materials.

• Azure sustainability guidance Cloud Skills Challenge: Azure sustainability advice Cloud Skills Challenge: This entertaining, free, interactive program helps people and teams become more skilled in using Microsoft cloud technologies through a gamified experience that makes use of Microsoft Learn content. Teams can use a personalized leaderboard, and individuals can compete against their counterparts in the industry.
• Azure sustainability guidance Microsoft Learn Collection: Share this with friends and coworkers right now, and come back later for updates on Azure sustainability activities. It was created as a starting point to assist you in finding pertinent learning materials. You can also make it your own by copying, customizing, and sharing this collection across your network.
• Principles of Sustainable Software Engineering course: The eight principles of Sustainable Software Engineering are introduced in this Microsoft Learn module, which covers a wide range of issues like electricity and carbon efficiency, carbon intensity, and how to consider trade-offs when optimizing. accessible to learners of any level who are familiar with the fundamentals of computers.

Here at CourseMonster, we know how hard it may be to find the right time and funds for training. We provide effective training programs that enable you to select the training option that best meets the demands of your company.

For more information, please get in touch with one of our course advisers today or contact us at training@coursemonster.com