A practical commitment to lower-impact hosting
Running software has an environmental cost. The servers our clients' systems sit on consume electricity, and that electricity has to come from somewhere. Over the past year we have made a deliberate effort to reduce the impact of the infrastructure we operate, and we want to be honest about what that does and does not mean.
The unglamorous wins matter most
The most effective thing we can do is also the least exciting: run efficient infrastructure and not waste it. A great deal of cloud spending — and the energy behind it — goes on capacity that is provisioned and then barely used. Over the past year we have gone through the systems we operate and right-sized them: matching the resources to the actual load, scaling down outside of busy hours, and switching off non-production environments overnight and at weekends when nobody is using them.
This work has a happy side effect. The same changes that reduce energy use also reduce our clients' bills. Efficiency is one of those rare cases where doing the responsible thing and doing the economical thing point in exactly the same direction.
Choosing where things run
Where we have a choice, we now favour cloud regions powered by a cleaner electricity mix, provided doing so does not compromise performance or data residency requirements. Major cloud providers publish information about the energy behind their regions, and we factor that into our architecture decisions alongside the usual considerations of latency, cost, and where data is legally allowed to live.
Honest about the limits
We are wary of overstating this. We are a small studio, not a hyperscale data centre operator, and we are not going to claim that our choices will change the climate. What we can do is avoid waste, make sensible decisions about where workloads run, and treat the environmental cost of infrastructure as a real factor rather than an afterthought. That is the commitment we are comfortable making, and we would rather make a modest one we can keep than a grand one we cannot.
Published by the Arcwell Systems team. Have a question about anything in this article? Get in touch — we're happy to talk.