An EUREKA! moment

Written By - Arwel Owen | December 28th, 2023

Two things happened recently that prompted me to return to the dusty old cupboard in which I store notes of past glories.

First, AWS' Technology Evangelist, Werner Vogels, announced the Frugal Architecture framework, a set of simple laws for building cost-aware and sustainable cloud architectures. Werner's laws focus on architecting for cost as a catalyst to drive sustainability. Whilst this is a noble cause, it should be flipped - architect for sustainability as a catalyst for cost savings. I say this because not all cost savings result in lower carbon emissions, e.g. opting for a 3yr Reserved Instance over a 1yr deal may reduce cost, but does nothing to cut carbon. Yet, almost all cloud architecture decisions that reduce carbon emissions also cut costs.

Secondly, Gartner's latest Tech Trends article states: "Organizations need a sustainable-technology framework that increases the energy and material efficiency of IT services, and enables enterprise sustainability through traceability, analytics, renewable energy, and AI. The framework should also call for the deployment of IT solutions that help customers achieve their own sustainability goals."

Both got me thinking about the framework I built back in 2017 to help take my firm's SAP landscape into the cloud at least-cost. It worked a treat and we reduced our SAP hosting costs by circa 40%. Dusting-off that framework today, it struck me that it already covers the vast majority of what Gartner is calling for, whilst also adding far more detail to Werner's sparse Frugal Architecture laws.

With concepts that are near identical, my framework simply needed a little tinkering to adapt 'cost' reduction to 'energy' reduction. Hence, Avilastar's Net Zero Transition Plan was reborn, and now forms the foundation of the Avilastar solution to minimise our clients SAP and Cloud carbon footprint.