'Continual innovation is necessary' to fight climate change, says AWS' Chris Wellise
New data centre cooling techniques, innovative server designs and redesigned processors - the fight against climate change is as iterative as it is complex
Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. It's an ironically inefficient phrase, but it perfectly sums up AWS' approach to the fight against climate change.
"From the beginning, we have focused on improving efficiency in every aspect of our infrastructure," says Chris Wellise, Director of AWS Sustainability. "From the highly available infrastructure that powers our servers, to techniques we use to cool our data centres and the innovative server designs that deliver AWS services to our customers, energy efficiency is a primary goal of our global infrastructure."
AWS is one of the world's largest cloud providers, with data centres around the world - and a vested interest in lowering their power consumption.
"On the whole, AWS data centres are more energy-efficient than enterprise sites due to comprehensive efficiency programs that touch every facet of the facility," said Wellise, pointing to a 2019 study by 451 Research that found AWS' infrastructure to be nearly four times more efficient than the median average enterprise (meaning a company's on-prem or colocation) data centre in the USA.
On average, hyperscale facilities like those belonging to AWS, Google and Microsoft far outstrip enterprise centres in terms of power efficiency, thanks to more efficient server population and higher server utilisation.
AWS is looking to even small details in an effort to improve data centre power consumption, recently replacing the Uninterruptible Power Supply with small battery packs and custom power supplies in every rack.
"Every time power is converted from one voltage to another, or from AC to DC and vice versa, some power is lost in the process. By eliminating the central UPS, we are able to reduce these conversions. Additionally, we've optimised our rack power supplies to reduce energy loss in that final conversion. Combined, these changes reduce energy conversion loss by about 35 per cent."
The company is also using its own Graviton2 processor in its data centres, which is more efficient than previous models.
"With the world's increasing need for compute and other IP infrastructures, continually innovating at the chip level is critical to ensuring that we can sustainably power the workloads of the future."
An eye to the future
Amazon as a company aims to make all of its energy use renewable by 2030, and AWS is set to meet that goal ahead of time: all of its infrastructure is on course to use renewables by 2025.
It's not only internal work, though; Amazon is funding and driving more than 230 climate projects worldwide. Together, they have the capacity to generate over 10,000 MW and deliver 27 million MWh of energy every year - which, according to the figures given in the company's annual Sustainability Report, would have been enough to fulfil all of Amazon's power needs (24 million MWh) in 2020.
Amazon is working with governments and utility suppliers worldwide to help fund these projects, using Corporate Power Purchase Agreements.
The climate issue stretches beyond power use, though, to topics like water and e-waste. Amazon is looking into those as well, with plans to reduce the amount of potable water it uses for data centre cooling and reduce waste. The also company founded The Climate Pledge - with campaigning group Global Optimism - in 2019, committing to reaching net-zero carbon by 2040, 10 years before the Paris Agreement's deadline, and in this year became a founding member of the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact.
But Amazon is a business, of course, and keeping customers happy has to be a consideration - even considering the importance of climate change. Luckily, Amazon's customers believe in green issues just as much as the company does.
"AWS works closely with our customers, including Saildrone and Capital One, to accelerate shared sustainability goals. Customers such as Acciona, BP, Engie and Shell are leveraging AWS to drive digital innovation, including data migration and application modernisation to cloud-native technologies, and to collaborate on artificial intelligence and machine learning use cases.
"These customers help accelerate Amazon's journey to meet our Climate Pledge goal by providing reliable, flexible solar and wind energy to power our operations with 100 per cent renewable energy."
The time of thinking about green initiatives as expensive and inefficient is over. As companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Delphix have proved, when tech firms and their customers are facing in the same direction, real change can happen fast.
Computing will run the Tech Impact Conference this year, exploring the relationship between tech and the climate - including case studies about the road to net zero, how to go green in your data centre and supply chain, and how to make small changes with a big impact. For those who are passionate about the planet - and those who are more wary - there has never been a better time to get involved.
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