How we slashed hosting costs & carbon emissions by 85% for 1 of the UK's biggest charities
summary
Rebuild moves a legacy Umbraco .NET 4.8 site into Azure Container Apps that scales to zero, cuts monthly hosting from ~£1,150 to ~£120 and drops server-side carbon by ~85%. GitHub Actions pipelines deliver zero‑downtime deployments, CPU down from 4 vCPU to 0.75 and memory from 16GB to 1.5GB, while Cloudflare caching rises to ~93% hit rate so origin requests fall ~91%—a working platform that is cheaper, faster and far greener.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:06Why this talk
- 3:34Legacy infrastructure
- 4:58Problems with Azure web apps
- 6:02Azure Container Apps benefits
- 7:45Scaling to zero benefits
- 8:52Digital sustainability matters
- 10:15Real cost savings
- 11:17Charity sustainability
- 13:02Cloudflare caching
- 15:27Cloudflare’s impact
- 17:31Client solutions
- 19:18Containerization ethics
- 20:20Summary of benefits and final thoughts
- 21:24Q&A: Carbon impact
- 22:45Q&A: Cloud providers
- 24:49Q&A: Cloudflare vs Azure CDN
- 26:55Q&A: Serverless solutions
- 28:45Q&A: ARM vs x86
- 30:08Closing
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