If you’ve been in a meeting lately where “sustainability” was mentioned, there’s a good chance someone said, “Yes, we should look into that,” and the conversation quietly moved on. It’s not that people don’t care, far from it. Most teams want to make things greener. The issue is that in the world of cloud infrastructure, it’s not always obvious where to start. The emissions don’t come from the office lights or the data centre next door anymore; they come from invisible workloads humming away on someone else’s server, somewhere in the world.
So, let’s talk about what actually helps, not in big, corporate-sounding terms, but in real steps that teams can take together to design a greener cloud.
Start with What You Can See
The first step isn’t about auditing or dashboards, it’s about awareness. Every organisation has workloads that no one has looked at for months. Old backups, zombie VMs, oversized instances quietly ticking up energy use (and costs).
It’s easy to assume those things don’t matter, because they’re “in the cloud.” But every idle workload still lives on a server drawing power, producing heat, and consuming resources.
Here’s a simple starting point:
- Make a quick inventory of what’s running and what’s actually needed.
- Schedule a half-hour session with your team: development, operations, and finance together, and highlight what looks redundant.
- For anything that’s still active, ask: Does it need to run 24/7?
Often, just switching from always-on to autoscaling or on-demand compute can cut both your bill and your footprint by double-digit percentages.
Measure Before You Optimise
If you don’t have visibility into your cloud emissions, you’re effectively trying to drive with your headlights off. The good news is that most major providers now offer some form of carbon reporting; AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and others all publish usage data and sustainability dashboards.
They’re not perfect, but they’re a start. Use them to identify where your biggest workloads live and which regions they run in. Location matters; running a workload in a data centre powered by renewable energy can dramatically reduce emissions compared to one on a fossil-heavy grid.
Once you’ve got some baseline numbers, don’t worry about being exact. The goal isn’t to build a PhD-level carbon model; it’s to get your team aligned on what’s worth tackling first.
Design Decisions That Make a Difference
Sustainability isn’t just about turning things off. It’s about designing for efficiency from the start.
Here are a few principles that tend to work well:
1. Right-size everything
Cloud pricing often pushes teams toward “just in case” provisioning. Go smaller. Most workloads perform fine on 60–70% of their allocated resources. Monitor for a week, then adjust.
2. Go serverless where you can
Serverless isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a sustainability multiplier. It scales automatically and shuts down when idle. That’s fewer wasted cycles, fewer watts, and less cost.
3. Choose green regions
Check your provider’s sustainability map. Some regions (like parts of Northern Europe or the Pacific Northwest) run on hydro or wind power almost entirely. You can often move workloads with minimal latency trade-offs.
4. Reuse, don’t rebuild
That “clean rewrite” of an app might feel satisfying, but it also creates an energy spike during migration and testing. Reuse proven components or APIs wherever possible. Incremental improvements add up.
Collaboration Beats Compliance
It’s easy to treat sustainability as something owned by compliance or corporate comms, but that misses the point. The teams that actually design, build, and deploy cloud systems hold most of the influence here.
Sustainability only sticks when it’s shared. A developer writing efficient code, a DevOps engineer scheduling non-peak batch jobs, and a project lead encouraging shared environments instead of duplicate ones, that’s where the difference happens.
Try setting up a short sustainability working group across departments. Nothing formal, just a half-hour monthly catch-up where people can share ideas, progress, or small wins. If someone’s found a way to cut runtime emissions by 20%, let them show how. If finance has identified better cost-to-emissions ratios for specific instance types, bring that into the discussion.
The biggest wins come when teams connect those dots together.
Think Lifecycle, Not Headlines
Sustainability doesn’t end once the dashboards show fewer tonnes of CO₂. Cloud systems have lifecycles: deployment, scaling, maintenance, and decommissioning. The greener ones are the ones that manage that full journey consciously.
Ask questions like:
- What happens when this service is no longer needed?
- How do we archive data responsibly instead of just stockpiling it?
- Are we using automation to shut down dev environments after hours?
Even small operational hygiene, things like deleting unused containers or clearing temporary storage, can have a meaningful impact when multiplied across hundreds of accounts.
And remember, the greenest resource is the one you never provisioned in the first place.
Transparency Builds Trust
Clients and partners increasingly ask for proof of sustainability, not promises. If your organisation is making progress, talk about it, openly, honestly, and with numbers.
Publish simple metrics in reports or internal updates:
- Total workloads reviewed
- Energy-efficient regions adopted
- Reduction in idle resource time
You don’t need a glossy “Sustainability Report” to show leadership. Just be consistent. Transparency shows that sustainability isn’t an afterthought; it’s part of how you operate.
Keep It Practical
If there’s one thing we’ve all learned about sustainability, it’s that good intentions fade fast without clear ownership. So, after reading this, pick one small thing your team can act on this week.
Maybe it’s scheduling an off-peak cleanup. Maybe it’s migrating one workload to a greener region. Or maybe it’s just adding carbon tracking to your next sprint review.
These small, iterative actions add up to real, measurable progress.
And as with all good collaboration, the best results come when people feel part of something. Sustainability doesn’t have to be a top-down mandate or a marketing tagline; it can be a culture of care that builds quietly, decision by decision, deployment by deployment.
Cloud sustainability isn’t a mystery or a moral test. It’s an engineering problem that benefits from teamwork, clear data, and a willingness to tweak the way we’ve always done things.
The cloud may be virtual, but its impact isn’t, and every thoughtful change we make today shapes the infrastructure of tomorrow.
So, greener by design really does start with us.
As the CEO of Disruptive LIVE, Kate has a demonstrated track record of driving business growth and innovation. With over 10 years of experience in the tech industry, I have honed my skills in marketing, customer experience, and operations management.
As a forward-thinking leader, I am passionate about helping businesses leverage technology to stay ahead of the competition and exceed customer expectations. I am always excited to connect with like-minded professionals to discuss industry trends, best practices, and new opportunities.
