Design principles

Organization-wide goals: Organizations should have long-term sustainability goals established based on each workload; types of resources being used for infrastructure and planning for growth. Designing workloads keeping in mind these goals and what future growth gives individual application owners benchmarks to work back from. Telecommunications organizations should keep the following in mind when establishing sustainability goals:

Center of sustainability: Creating a Center of Sustainability within the organization will create a team and a one-threaded leader that can work towards establishing these goals and accelerating achievement of those. They will be responsible for aligning workloads to these goals, reducing current carbon footprint by exploring innovative technologies and optimizing upon existing infrastructure.

Network energy efficiency: Telecommunications Organizations should have guardrails in place to optimize energy consumption of the RAN, transport, core network, and IT infrastructure. Organizations should also consider developing depreciation schedules for legacy networks that are no longer being utilized and that are not energy efficient.

Use O-RAN: With Open RAN, it is possible for telecom operators to leverage multiple RAN technologies. This gives telecom operators the opportunity to leverage more efficient RAN capabilities from different vendors and suppliers. It allows us to deploy new innovations, like miniaturization of radios, at a much more rapid scale.

Monitoring and observability: Progressing towards sustainability goals is difficult without having visibility across the entire network and IT infrastructure's carbon emissions. Having a robust monitoring system, which provides a single pane of glass on each component's carbon footprint would provide actionable insights that drive sustainability plans. Utilize AWS's carbon footprint measurement tools which provides customers with tools to measure and report on GHG emissions from AWS usage, which complement sustainability frameworks.

Renewable energy and green network: Utilizing renewable energy to power telecom networks can go a long way in reducing carbon emissions. For example, instead of using diesel generators, operators might consider solar power, wind power, lithium-ion batteries, and renewable electricity from a renewable source.

Use managed and serverless services: Enables organizations to automatically scale resources based on actual demand while reducing idle compute time and maximizing resource utilization. This architectural approach shifts compute resources to centralized data centers and leverages cloud efficiencies to significantly reduce power consumption and operating costs while maintaining high availability for telecom operations. The event-driven nature of serverless computing maintains optimal resource allocation by blocking unnecessary resource consumption during low traffic periods and automatic scaling during peak demands.

Maximize utilization: Right-sizing compute, storage, network infrastructure to support an end-to-end telecom network is key to optimizing its footprint. Energy efficient designs to verify high utilization and maximize the energy efficiency of the underlying hardware. Two hosts running at 30% utilization are less efficient than one host running at 60% due to baseline power consumption per host. At the same time, minimize idle resources, processing, and storage to reduce the total energy required to power your workload.

Anticipate and adopt new, more efficient hardware and software offerings: Support the upstream improvements your partners and suppliers make to assist you to reduce the impact of your cloud workloads. Continually monitor and evaluate new, more efficient hardware and software offerings. Design for flexibility to allow for the rapid adoption of new efficient technologies.

Retire legacy networks (2G/3G) and migrate customers to more energy efficient technologies such as 5G: Dated hardware and legacy networks lead to more energy consumption and higher carbon footprint. Moving away from them and towards newer technologies can assist CSPs to be more energy efficient.