By: Daniel Fratte, Green Tech Advocate, Thoughtworks Europe
AWS GameDays are fun events in which cloud practitioners challenge each other in a particular theme. Usually a fictional situation is presented to teams and they need to respond to customer, product managers or CEO demands by working out specific and time-constrained problems of the current state of the cloud architecture.
Last Friday, a team from Thoughtworks Spain joined the first event of 2023 hosted by AWS in which approximately 20 teams were asked to improve a particular infrastructure setup from the AWS Well-Architected Framework’s Sustainability Pillar. The state of the infrastructure in the scenario presented inefficiencies in compute and storage resources. To address this, for compute services, the team relied on observability tools e.g. monitors, rules and alarms to optimally scale compute instances based on incoming requests. Moreover, the team identified which type or family of compute resources was the most appropriate for the use case at hand. This way CPU utilization improved and energy consumption and cost went down. In terms of storage, the challenge consisted in optimizing database queries executed by cloud functions, so that they would retrieve only the necessary data and nothing more.
By taking a lean approach to optimizing cloud resources, the Thoughtworks Spain team achieved second place. Thoughtworks has a long history in sustainability and advocating for practices that eliminate waste. In the area of cloud computing, we are proud of our work with clients such as Holaluz who were able to discover potential emissions savings of ~14% by rightsizing compute resources in non-production environments by using the Cloud Carbon Footprint tool created by Thoughtworks.