Posted By: TerraAlto – July 26th 2024

About the Customer
National Broadband Ireland was established in 2019 to fulfil the Irish government’s ambitious National Broadband Plan (NBP) with the aim of rolling out high-speed fibre broadband to all premises in rural Ireland and to manage the network for 25 years.

Customer Challenge

For NBI, sustainability is integral to their mission. By connecting innovators through the rollout of high-speed fibre broadband all over Ireland, NBI are creating opportunities for progress and advancing innovative solutions to address climate change. By championing equity and opportunity through equal access to the Internet, they are giving our future policy makers and disruptors the chance to create long-lasting solutions to the challenges of climate change. In keeping with this overarching goal, it’s crucially important to NBI that the AWS platform on which they run their business operations, is configured and managed with sustainability best practices in mind.

Partner Solution

In our role as AWS Managed Service Provider to NBI, TerraAlto have responded to the challenge of optimizing the NBI AWS environment for energy efficiency and reduced resource consumption. In this case study, we will 12 key AWS configuration optimizations implemented by TerraAlto in the NBI AWS environment and explain how each contributed to lowering NBI’s overall energy usage and resource consumption.

  1. Adjusting PowerBI Data Processing Job Schedules:

    Optimization: TerraAlto worked with the NBI team to adjusted the scheduling of PowerBI data processing jobs to reduce the operational hours during which the AWS EC2 instance hosting the PowerBI application needed to run.

    Sustainability Benefit: By aligning job execution schedules with actual business needs, TerraAlto reduced the runtime of the EC2 instance, minimizing its energy consumption. This led to less time spent on compute resources during off-peak hours, contributing to a lower carbon footprint.

  2. Monthly Review and Decommissioning of Unused AWS Workspaces:

    Optimization: TerraAlto performed a monthly review of AWS Workspaces, identifying dormant or unused workspaces and decommissioning them.

    Sustainability Benefit: By regularly shutting down inactive workspaces, NBI reduced unnecessary resource usage, preventing idle systems from consuming power. This helped eliminate wastage of storage and compute resources, cutting down on energy consumption and AWS costs.

  3. Decommissioning of Unused Sandbox Environments:

    Optimization: TerraAlto decommissioned various sandbox environments that were no longer actively used by the NBI team.

    Sustainability Benefit: The decommissioning of these environments reduced the number of running instances and storage volumes, leading to a direct reduction in energy and resource consumption.

  4. AWS CloudWatch Anomaly Detection:

    Optimization: In NBI’s non-production environments, the number of AWS RDS Aurora cluster instances was reduced from two to one.

    Sustainability Benefit: By scaling down the number of database instances in non-production environments, TerraAlto significantly cut down on the resources required to maintain these environments. Reducing the number of instances resulted in decreased energy use and lower overall emissions tied to database operations.

  5. Reconfiguring AWS ECS Clusters for Reduced Task Host Count:

    Optimization: TerraAlto reconfigured NBI’s AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) clusters in non-production environments, reducing the task host count from two to one.

    Sustainability Benefit: Fewer task hosts meant less compute power was required, translating into reduced energy consumption for containerized applications. In non-production environments, where workloads were not as intensive, this adjustment prevented over-provisioning and unnecessary energy use.

  6. Using AWS Instance Scheduler for Start-Stop Schedule:

    Optimization: TerraAlto implemented AWS Instance Scheduler to enforce start-stop schedules for non-production EC2 and RDS instances, running them only from Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

    Sustainability Benefit: Limiting the operating hours of non-production instances reduced energy consumption during nights and weekends when these resources were not needed. This approach led to a significant reduction in the overall time that EC2 and RDS instances were active, lowering both energy usage and associated costs.

  7. Scheduling Non-Production ECS Clusters Using AWS Lambda:

    Optimization: AWS Lambda was used to automate the start-stop schedule for non-production ECS clusters, mirroring the schedule applied to EC2 and RDS resources.

    Sustainability Benefit: Automating the scheduling of ECS clusters ensured that containers were only running during business hours, reducing energy waste.

  8. Downgrading Non-Production EBS Volumes:

    Optimization: TerraAlto downgraded non-production Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes from the General Purpose SSD (GP2) class to the Throughput Optimized HDD (ST1) class.

    Sustainability Benefit: The switch to a more energy-efficient storage class reduced the power requirements for storing non-critical data. By opting for ST1 over GP2 in non-production environments, NBI was able to significantly lower its storage-related energy consumption without compromising performance for non-essential workloads.

  9. Migrating Non-Production EFS Storage to Single-AZ:

    Optimization: TerraAlto migrated non-production Elastic File System (EFS) storage resources from a Multi-AZ configuration to a Single-AZ configuration.

    Sustainability Benefit: Single-AZ storage configurations consume fewer resources compared to Multi-AZ setups. By aligning the storage configuration with the lower availability needs of non-production environments, TerraAlto reduced the infrastructure’s energy demands, leading to more efficient resource utilization and a reduced environmental impact.

  10. Introducing Storage Lifecycle Policies for EFS:

    Optimization: TerraAlto introduced storage lifecycle policies into non-production EFS resources to move inactive data to the Infrequent Access (IA) storage class after a specified period of inactivity.

    Sustainability Benefit: Moving infrequently accessed data to lower-cost, lower-energy storage tiers further reduced the energy footprint of NBI’s storage infrastructure. This optimization ensured that energy-intensive storage was reserved only for frequently accessed data, while less active data consumed minimal power.

  11. Resizing Tableau Cluster Instances:

    Optimization: TerraAlto resized three EC2 instances in NBI’s Tableau cluster from m5.4xlarge (16 vCPUs) to r6a.2xlarge (8 vCPUs).

    Sustainability Benefit: By choosing a smaller and more efficient instance type, NBI reduced the compute power and energy consumption required for Tableau workloads. The optimization ensured that the cluster used only the necessary amount of compute resources, preventing over-provisioning and wasted energy.

  12. Resizing the PowerBI EC2 Instance:

    Optimization: TerraAlto resized NBI’s PowerBI EC2 instance from c5.9xlarge (36 vCPUs) to r7i.4xlarge (16 vCPUs).

    Sustainability Benefit: Similar to the Tableau instance resizing, reducing the size of the PowerBI instance cut down on resource consumption and energy use. The smaller instance was still able to handle the required workloads, ensuring efficient use of compute resources and minimizing the energy impact of running PowerBI in the cloud.

 

Benefits

Through the implementation of these 12 AWS configuration optimizations, TerraAlto delivered substantial sustainability benefits for NBI. Collectively, these optimizations led to:

  • Reduced Energy Consumption: By aligning resource usage with business hours, rightsizing instances, and decommissioning unused resources, NBI significantly cut down its overall energy consumption across its AWS infrastructure.
  • Lower Carbon Footprint: Reduced resource usage in non-production environments, optimized storage configurations, and more efficient compute power usage contributed to lowering NBI’s carbon emissions associated with its AWS operations.
  • Cost Savings: By consuming fewer resources, NBI benefited from reduced AWS costs, contributing to both financial and environmental sustainability.
  • Improved Operational Efficiency: With fewer resources running in the background, NBI’s IT team was able to focus on core production environments and critical workloads, enhancing overall operational efficiency.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the optimizations implemented by TerraAlto not only improved NBI’s AWS cost efficiency but also aligned with the company’s sustainability goals, demonstrating how cloud infrastructure can be fine-tuned to reduce energy consumption and environmental impact.

About The Partner

TerraAlto, a RICOH Group company, is an AWS Advanced Consulting and MSP Partner with an AWS DevOps Competency, who help organisations build and manage advanced solutions utilising AWS services for big data, IoT and enterprise data platforms. With an extensive experience of delivering greenfield implementations, migrations and application innovations, TerraAlto have worked with a wide range of client organisations ranging from tech start-ups to large global organizations.


As an approved member of the AWS Managed Service Provider Partner Program, TerraAlto provides 24-7 managed services for AWS environments in Europe and in Asia (including China). As an active participant in the AWS Well-Architected Framework Program, TerraAlto helps their clients to ensure secure and compliant usage of AWS services including the building of automated compliance frameworks for enterprise-wide exception alerting and reporting.