Announcing sustainability guidance for Azure Kubernetes Service

On October 24 we released new technical guidance to help customers and partners achieve their sustainability goals using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) – guidance to help you improve efficiency of your AKS workloads and create new business value while reducing your operational footprint.

Sustainability guidance for AKS

As part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to promote sustainable development and low-carbon business practices globally, we’ve released sustainability guidance within the Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF) designed to help you optimize your Azure workloads for greener IT.

In alignment with this WAF guidance, our new sustainability guidance for AKS is focused on Azure Kubernetes Services you're building or operating on Azure and includes design and configuration checklists, recommended design, and configuration options. 

This sustainability guidance set is part of a broader initiative to help customers navigate the steep learning curve around how to meet and plan for evolving sustainability

What’s in sustainability guidance for AKS?

The guidance currently provides a set of Kubernetes green software patterns, that are applicable to AKS cluster and workloads, and cover their development lifecycle, from design, to configuration, to operations.

In the next phases, we are looking to provide a self-guided sustainability assessment, as well as a reference architecture and implementation of those patterns, to help you better implement and operate a sustainable AKS solution.

Who benefits from this guidance?

The main audience for the AKS sustainability guidance is architects, lead developers, and platform operators. Understanding how and where you can reduce the carbon emissions and energy use of AKS workloads is key to meeting and planning for rapidly evolving sustainability requirements. In addition, this content can provide a foundation for broader enterprise adoption of sustainable design principles.

Alignment with the Green Software Foundation

The Green Software Foundation defines the concepts of green principles, patterns, and practices.
The principles of green software outline a core set of competencies needed to define, run and build green software.

A green software pattern is a specific example of how to apply one or more principles in a real-world example. Whereas principles describe the theory that underpins green software, patterns are the practical advice software practitioners can use in their software applications today. Patterns are vendor-neutral.

A green software practice is a pattern applied to a specific vendor's product and informs practitioners about how to use that product in a more sustainable way.

Designed in close collaboration with customers and colleagues at the Green Software Foundation (GSF), AKS sustainability guidance is designed as a green software practice, built on vendor-neutral patterns, that are shared by the green software community.

Fig 1. Principles, Patterns, and Practices of the Green Software Foundation.

In the words of contributor Farouk Friha:

“Although sustainability is essential for our customers, it is not clear to them where and how to start. Helping them face this challenge on Azure with innovative tools and clear guidance aligned with the principles of the Green Software Foundation is one of our priorities.

As we continue to help our customers on this journey, creating guidance tailored to the specifics of Azure Kubernetes Service has become obvious for me given its popularity. I am delighted to have collaborated on this initiative to help our customers have a meaningful impact on the carbon pollution of their applications.”

How should I get started?

1. Review the guidance: https://aka.ms/aks/sustainability
2. Share your questions and feedback, we’d love to hear from you.

About the Authors

Yassine El Ghali is a Cloud Solution Architect and a Sustainability Product Manager, working with the Microsoft green software community, the Green Software Foundation and the Cloud Native Foundation, to build sustainable cloud native services.

Farouk Friha is a Sr. Cloud Solution Architect and additionally a Technical Program Manager driving Sustainability from Customer Success Unit (representing WW Cloud Solution Architects).