What are your thoughts on Amazon's latest sustainability report?  Do you know or understand that you can now decide to run in data centres that are greener as well as cheaper?  There are tools and automation to help you achieve your net-zero and cloud financial goals...

Amazon does more than just about any company in America to reduce emissions. This is because of cloud computing (more efficient than traditional colo / datacenter for a variety of reasons) and retail (central depot and shared, increasingly EV delivery vs a million cars running errands and going to the mall etc). Those who are critical of these businesses are simply bad at math or (in rather extreme cases) “buy nothing” luddites who do not see cloud, data or physical products necessary regardless of how efficiently they are delivered. Amazon deserves “company of the year” from a sustainability standpoint for these reasons. Oh, and they also have made something like a million American jobs, too. Only in my crazy hometown of Seattle would we see Amazon as the problem instead of the solution. :)

I'm always happy that the big players publish something on this front, and in Amazon's case across many different topics of their activities. That being said, I'm also a little dissappointed by what is *not* in the report, and by some of the "devil is in the details" aspects:
- There is lots of focus on carbon, but not that much on energy usage per se. Google reports its total energy consumption for the year in its own reports, but Amazon never gets around to giving us a TWh/yr figure (either for the total usage or the total renewable produced).
- Amazon still seems to be looking at this using yearly figures rather than the 24x7 grid-local hourly matching figures that Google is using, and which seems to be becoming the accepted standard
- Other aspects of AWS activities like server manufacturing impact aren't really covered (at least that I could see)
- The Carbon Footprint tool in the AWS console is still pretty useless, and really hasn't changed since it's initial release 18 months ago, which is pretty frustrating.

But again, I think it's positive that these reports are produced, and it's clear that Amazon and the other big cloud providers are making real efforts in this space.