Member post originally published on the Mia-platform blog by Graziano Casto
The information and communication technology sector alone contributes around 1.4% of global emissions, making sustainability a critical issue in today’s tech industry. Gartner predicts that within the next two years, 75% of organizations will replace vendors lacking sustainability goals and timelines. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals further push organizations to create sustainable products and services by 2030. With IT waste for the average enterprise reaching up to 45%, the importance of sustainable digital solutions in optimizing profits and protecting the environment is clear.
In this article, we will explore the connections between GreenOps and FinOps, showing how integrating these methodologies can help organizations achieve business goals while managing their environmental impact.
A brief introduction to GreenOps
GreenOps represents a holistic approach that combines business practices and technological innovations to improve cloud efficiency while reducing environmental impact. This model encompasses all efforts an organization undertakes to lower the environmental footprint of their cloud operations. It involves formulating strategies that enhance sustainability and align with business goals, such as reducing waste, transitioning to renewable energy sources, and promoting a culture of environmental responsibility.
Within the GreenOps operational model, organizations may adopt a spatial-shift strategy to relocate resources to regions that leverage renewable energy, thus cutting down their carbon emissions. Practices such as deactivating resources during non-peak hours can conserve energy and reduce operational expenses. Additionally, creating energy-efficient frameworks for workloads ensures optimal use of resources, maximizing performance while minimizing waste.
Furthermore, GreenOps advocates for the continuous monitoring and optimization of cloud resources to discover additional improvement opportunities. This could include adopting more energy-efficient hardware, optimizing software to lower energy consumption, and utilizing advanced analytics to forecast and manage energy usage more efficiently.
GreenOps also emphasizes integrating sustainability goals into the company’s core values and daily operations. This involves educating employees on best practices for sustainable cloud usage, fostering innovation in green technologies, and regularly evaluating and reporting on the company’s environmental impact.
By implementing GreenOps, organizations can achieve a dual advantage: driving business growth and profitability while contributing to environmental conservation. This approach helps meet regulatory requirements and customer expectations for sustainability, and positions the company as a leader in corporate social responsibility.
FinOps in a nutshell
FinOps represents a strategic shift that integrates technology, finance, and business practices to enhance efficiency and optimize the financial performance of cloud computing infrastructure.
Given that cloud computing constitutes a significant operational expense for many companies, a growing number of businesses are adopting FinOps. By promoting shared responsibility for cloud costs, companies can gain a comprehensive understanding of their cloud expenditure, enabling them to optimize these costs, maximize profits, and enhance their competitive edge.
The FinOps Foundation describes the concept as an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to achieve maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology, and business teams collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.
In essence, FinOps refers to a discipline and cultural mindset that encourages collaboration between different departments within an organization to optimize IT spending. The primary teams involved in FinOps are the Finance department and DevOps teams. This cross-functional dialogue aims to maximize the value derived from cloud services by balancing speed, cost, and quality, while carefully considering the impact of cloud expenditures on the overall results. In FinOps, every decision regarding cloud spending is evaluated through a data-driven decision-making process, focusing on optimization, cost forecasting, and cost allocation.
By adopting FinOps, organizations not only streamline their cloud financial management but also cultivate a culture of transparency and collaboration, leading to better financial outcomes and enhanced business value.
What’s the synergy between GreenOps and FinOps?
Although FinOps and GreenOps are distinct approaches, they work together seamlessly to help companies optimize their cloud usage and costs while also reducing their environmental footprint. By integrating these two strategies, businesses can achieve both financial efficiency and sustainability. FinOps is a key component of GreenOps. By ensuring optimal use of cloud resources, companies not only save costs but also reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, making it a win-win situation. This synergy makes FinOps an essential framework for companies aiming to enhance their sustainability efforts.
While FinOps focuses on monitoring IT spending and cloud-related expenses, GreenOps tracks the carbon footprint of the infrastructure, whether it’s entirely cloud-based or a hybrid model. Despite their different goals, the two methodologies are interconnected, especially in full cloud environments, with a shared aim of optimizing cloud resources through proper dimensioning.
For instance, a more powerful virtual machine instance not only costs more but also demands more power, resulting in higher emissions. This correlation highlights the need to integrate FinOps and GreenOps to balance costs, emissions, and power requirements effectively.
From a high-level perspective, GreenOps and FinOps appear quite similar, sharing the ultimate goal of efficient cloud usage. Achieving maximum efficiency leads to two main outcomes: reduced costs and lower carbon emissions. The same FinOps practices, such as right-sizing, storage tiering, removing idle and unattached resources, and scheduling compute off times, are also applied in GreenOps to reduce carbon emissions. In his closing remarks at AWS re:Invent, Werner Vogels highlighted this connection by stating that cost is a close proxy for sustainability, affirming the tightly integrated relationship between FinOps and GreenOps.
By understanding and implementing both FinOps and GreenOps, organizations can better manage their cloud resources, cutting costs while also minimizing their environmental impact. This dual approach not only meets regulatory and customer expectations for sustainability but also positions companies as leaders in corporate social responsibility.
Put the theory into practice: a real-world scenario
Imagine a scenario where all environments typically used in a software delivery pipeline —development, staging, and production—operate with the same number of pods on an identical infrastructure, each with overlapping computational demands. By keeping development and staging environments active outside working hours, we end up using unnecessary resources for 128 out of the 168 hours in a week. This translates to roughly 103% more usage than necessary. In practical terms, engineers use these environments only about 23% of the time, highlighting the significant resource wastage in many engineering companies.
Fortunately, addressing this inefficiency is straightforward. With a few configuration lines and the installation of a Kubernetes operator called kube‑green, we can drastically reduce resource wastage. Kube-green is an add-on for Kubernetes that automates the shutdown of unnecessary resources and restarts them as needed, using a simple configuration known as CRD SleepInfo.
Consider a cluster managing 75 namespaces, where we aim to suspend 48 namespaces outside working hours (our development and staging environments) while keeping deployments named api-gateway active. Without kube-green, this cluster runs about 1050 pods, with 75 GB of memory and 45 CPUs allocated, and consumes 45 GB of memory and 4.5 CPUs. This usage results in approximately 222 kg of CO2 emissions per week.
By configuring SleepInfo with kube-green, we can reduce the total pod count by 600, bringing it down to 450. Allocated resources drop to 30 GB of memory and 15 CPUs. Actual resource consumption decreases to 21 GB of memory and 1 CPU, lowering emissions to about 139 kg of CO2 per week.
Using kube-green on this cluster for a week reduces CO2 emissions by 83 kg, a 38% decrease compared to normal operations. Over a year, this translates to a reduction of approximately 4000 kg of CO2. This not only benefits the environment but also results in significant cost savings. Most cloud providers charge based on the number of nodes used, so reducing node count during off-hours lowers operational costs.
| Without kube‑green | With kube‑green | Difference | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU consumed [cpu] | 5 | 1 | 5 |
| CPU allocated [cpu] | 40 | 15 | 25 |
| CO2eq/week [kg] | 222 | 139 | 83 |
Implementing kube-green offers a dual advantage: environmental sustainability and financial savings. By optimizing resource usage and reducing emissions, companies can achieve a more efficient and cost-effective cloud infrastructure.
Wrapping up
Adopting FinOps practices alongside GreenOps allows us to use cost as a driver for GreenOps implementation, aligning business benefits with environmental advantages. With tools like kube-green, we can integrate our GreenOps strategy seamlessly into our existing workload management, achieving positive impacts on both infrastructure costs and sustainability.
GreenOps and FinOps are closely intertwined concepts. Often, when we optimize resources from a sustainability standpoint, we also realize savings on our cloud expenses. To make well-informed decisions, it’s crucial to have visibility into both the costs of our clusters and their CO2eq emissions. Many cost monitoring tools, like OpenCost, now include carbon cost emissions tracking in addition to tracking cloud spending.
By leveraging FinOps and GreenOps together, we can enhance our operational efficiency and reduce our environmental footprint without significant changes to how we manage workloads. Tools such as kube-green enable automatic scaling down of resources during off-peak hours, ensuring we only use what is necessary. This not only minimizes energy consumption and emissions but also translates into substantial cost savings, as most cloud service providers charge based on resource usage.
Having insight into both financial and environmental metrics empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions that benefit both the bottom line and the planet. Monitoring tools that provide comprehensive views of both cost and carbon emissions help businesses balance efficiency with sustainability, reinforcing the symbiotic relationship between FinOps and GreenOps.
In essence, combining FinOps with GreenOps helps us create a more sustainable and cost-effective cloud infrastructure, driving business success while promoting environmental responsibility.