A panellist at techUK’s half-day hybrid event on making cloud computing more sustainable, representing Scott Logic. My session looked at optimising the cloud through GreenOps, data management and wider sustainable best practice.
I shared the panel with:
- Su Crighton, Partner, KPMG
- John Abel, Managing Director, Office of the CTO, Google Cloud
- James Hall, Head of GreenOps, Greenpixie
Panel highlights:
- Behaviour change takes precedence over policy on paper. Make sustainable choices the easy default: auto-archive, auto-delete, and design apps so people don’t have to think to do the right thing.
- Measure what influences decisions. Go beyond PUE and surface metrics that shift behaviour at the edge, including energy per workload, storage tiering, access frequency, and real user nudges.
- GreenOps as a business value, not just a virtue. Balance carbon, cost, capacity, and risk. Provide engineers with comparable data on carbon intensity, chip efficiency, and instance types so trade-offs are clear.
- Dark data and ownership: Decide who owns retention, tiering, and deletion. Set policies and automate. Compliance data should be stored on the appropriate tier, not the most expensive one.
- Make sustainability the default. Implement guardrails in landing zones, use efficient instance presets, and adopt practical architectural choices that reduce runtime work. Faster developer time alone is not enough.
- Lifecycle matters. Don’t overlook embodied carbon in hardware or the ongoing costs of keeping systems operational and upgraded.
- AI changes the unit of work. Treat tokens like CPU hours; make costs and carbon footprint transparent; expect increased interest in on-device and hybrid inference for privacy and grid pressure.
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