Best practice 15.2 – Encourage sustainable thinking

Software architects are often encouraged to apply systems thinking to the problems they tackle. To zoom out and look at the bigger picture and how the different components interact and form a whole. To build sustainable cloud workloads also requires sustainability thinking – including environmental impact as a parameter in design and planning.

Organizations should include sustainability requirements when considering new projects, and continuously evaluate the environmental impact of existing workloads. They should find the balance between business needs and sustainable goals – and creative solutions to achieve both.

Encourage questioning business requirements on sustainability grounds. For example, when considering the update frequency of dashboards, include the impact on things like energy usage in the discussions. Sometimes this leads to insights such as that only some of the KPIs need frequent updates, while the majority of the dashboard contents only need updating once per day. This can result in a reduction in energy usage while still delivering the same business value.

Suggestion 15.2.1 – Review the update frequency of your reports and dashboards

Running reports and refreshing dashboards can be a compute intensive process. Continuously review the business requirements and question how frequently refreshes are needed. Can some reports be run only on demand because they are accessed infrequently? Can reports that today run on demand instead be run on a schedule to have them always available instead of multiple people running them many times per day? Does every KPI need to be refreshed at the same time?

Suggestion 15.2.2 – Review your reports, dashboards, and metrics and remove what is no longer needed

As organizations evolve, so does business requirements.. Over time, some reports and dashboards become more important and used, and others less. New metrics become important, and reports and dashboards accumulate elements that are no longer necessary.

Continually evaluate business requirements and remove what is no longer needed. Remove metrics from reports when they are not necessary, and remove whole reports and dashboards when they lose their relevance. Efficient reporting has a positive impact on your sustainability goals. Your organization can also identify similar goals across teams or departments to reduce the number of separate reports and thereby reduce duplication and overlap.

Suggestion 15.2.3– Review the running frequency of your data pipelines

Data pipelines are the backbone of analytics platforms. They process data and produce new data sets. They are compute-intensive processes that can have a big impact on the overall environmental impact of your analytics platform. The more frequently they run, the higher the impact. Work backwards from your business requirements and decide appropriate running frequencies that balance business value and environmental impact.

Consider splitting pipeline jobs when there is an opportunity to run the majority of its calculations on a lower frequency while still maintaining the overall business goals.

Suggestion 15.2.4– Be flexible in your job schedules

It’s common to run jobs on regular schedules, like hourly or daily, often at the top of the hour. When using managed and serverless technologies, the service often keeps a warm pool of compute resources to be able to meet demand. The pool needs to be managed to meet peaks in demand, and for job-oriented services this often coincides with the top of the hour. By being flexible in when you run your jobs, and for example avoiding the top of the hour, you can help the service smooth out demand.

This is similar to how you can optimize your own resource usage by implementing buffering and throttling, as described in SUS02-BP06 Implement buffering or throttling to flatten the demand curve.