10b. Build on operational best practices
There are a number of approaches that we can take to build on operational best practices and reduce environmental impacts as far as possible.
Likely Lead Roles
Service owner, business analyst, delivery manager
Sub-actions
10b. (i) Set Service Level Objectives that balance performance, reliability and sustainability
10b. (ii) Continue to optimise and refactor new code
10b. (iii) Use spot instances
10b. (iv) Turn off unneeded resources
10b. (v) Schedule carbon aware updates
(i) Set Service Level Objectives that balance performance, reliability and sustainability
A service level objective (SLO) is an agreed target for a particular service over a period of time. SLOs can build upon sustainability non-functional requirements (NFRs) to balance performance, reliability and sustainability targets.
Environmental benefit:
Setting SLOs for sustainability can serve to ensure that environmental impacts continue to be monitored and reduced through the live phase of a service.
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(ii) Continue to optimise and refactor new code
Refactoring is the process of restructuring code, without affecting its original functionality. It can make code more efficient, cleaner and reusable.
Environmental benefit:
Optimised code reduces resources and energy used.
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(iii) Use spot instances
Spot instances are unused cloud capacity that can be used at reduced prices. Making use of spot instances requires workloads with flexible start and end times. See 8b.(vi) Design for asynchronous patterns and transactions.
Environmental benefit:
Use spot instances to help cloud providers to improve data centre utilisation and reduce carbon footprint of workloads.
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(iv) Turn off unneeded resources
Turn off all environments out of hours. This should be the default pattern for all non-production environments, including testing, QA or pre-production environments.
Environmental benefit:
Turning off environments when not in use saves on energy consumption.
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(v) Schedule carbon aware updates
Rather than patching immediately, where possible schedule updates to take advantage of low carbon electricity.
Environmental benefit:
Updates scheduled when there is lower-carbon electricty available reduce carbon footprint.