GreenOps: Managing the Carbon Footprint of your Cloud Landscape

Showback and Chargeback are familiar terms from financial stewardship in the cloud. These principles foster cost transparency and source-based billing, which are utilized in the FinOps methodology throughout three phases: Inform, Optimize, and Operate. These are applied to maximize the pay-per-use model’s benefits of cloud resources, fostering transparency and accountability. In the same vein, the allocation of financial costs is comparable to that of environmental costs. This implies that creating transparency and genuine responsibility for application teams can be effectively translated from a financial to an environmental perspective. For instance, in the Inform phase, users achieve clarity about their current carbon emissions and their allocation, and they would learn about their sustainable options (concerning environmental impact), which are increasingly provided by the cloud service providers themselves. Through the Optimize phase, adjustments to the infrastructure with the goal of minimizing the CO2 footprint can be implemented and measured. Lastly, in the Operate phase, the focus is on fostering accountability of all people involved by investing in training and sharing knowledge on sustainable cloud practices.