Platform.sh commits to helping its customers reduce carbon emissions from cloud activ

Paris/San Francisco, 17th March 2022 - Platform.sh, a unified, secure, enterprise-grade platform for building, running and scaling web applications, has worked with Greenly to calculate its carbon emissions to provide a clear picture to its customers.

Climate change is real. The IT sector is estimated to be responsible for 4% of the global GES emissions, a bigger impact than the airline industry already, and it is growing much faster. Platform.sh is committed to reducing its impact on the environment, alongside its customers, as a signatory to the Climate Act.

Platform.sh limits environmental impact by reducing its hardware and energy usage, then optimising its respective emissions and offsetting what is leftover.

Platform.sh reduces energy use by:
• Application Performance Monitoring—optimising individual apps performance means using fewer resources to run the same workloads.
• Increasing server density—servers are often under-utilised and under-optimised, with anything between 60-80% of their capacity going to waste. Platform.sh uses proprietary technology to increase density up to 12 times and cut energy usage up to 10x.
• Rightsizes and scales—No more overprovisioning. Platform.sh works with businesses to understand their needs today and allow them to grow fast and responsibly.

Platform.sh optimises infrastructure to reduce emissions by:
• Supports multiple cloud providers—optimising infrastructure providers offer different advantages, including better Power Usage Effectiveness. Customers can choose the cloud providers that offer the most benefits, where it matters.
• Using the right location—data center location can make a huge difference to CO2e emissions. For example, a datacenter in Sweden, using renewable energy, emits ten times less CO2e per kWh than one powered by coal-generated electricity in Germany.

The rise of cloud services and cloud hosting makes it easy to forget about certain carbon costs—but any business aiming to reduce emissions must understand its complete carbon footprint.

To enable this, Platform.sh is improving its environmental impact model and opening it to its customers, allowing them to take impactful action.

“We have a responsibility to not just be a sustainable business, but to ensure everything we do enables our customers to be sustainable too—they need to be able to understand their impact to either reduce it or offset it,” said Fred Plais, CEO, Platform.sh. “In the past it was common to improve performance by “throwing more metal” at it—that is, to use more and better hardware. This approach is fundamentally flawed, solving nothing in the long run, and contributing to environmental damage.”