Engineering for Sustainability
summary
Claim: cloud and software choices drive measurable carbon costs and simple fixes scale. Use AWS Customer Carbon Footprint or GCP Carbon Footprint API and cloudcarbonfootprint.org to measure scope 1–3; an underutilized m4.large EC2 for one hour emits as much CO2 as driving ~4 km. Data storage is 15% of digital carbon footprint now and may exceed 40% by 2025, while only 10–15% of stored data is used. Actions: automate retention and archiving, deprecate idle instances, tune APIs with Software Carbon Intensity, or consolidate to greener cloud regions.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Engineering sustainability intro
- 1:06Climate change and engineering
- 2:10Carbon emission scopes
- 4:43Monitoring IT carbon emissions
- 6:46Optimizing resource utilization
- 9:58Cloud efficiency and scale
- 11:23Digital pollution reduction
- 14:37Automating data lifecycle
- 16:25SREs and sustainable engineering
- 17:08Call to action
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