What is Your Carbon Footprint?

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes
Last Updated: 2025-04-28

Disclaimer: The details described in this post are the results of my own research and investigations. While some effort has been expended in ensuring their accuracy - with ubiquitous references to source material - I cannot guarantee that accuracy. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organization I am associated with, past or present.

Sometimes there’s an interesting part of AWS that completely passes you by. One example for me is the Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, which provides statistics of carbon emissions from your organisation’s use of cloud resources.

You’ll find it under Cost and Usage Analysis in the Billing and Cost Management service, and you can find a month-by-month breakdown of carbon emissions in MTCO2e by macroregion (AMER, APAC, EMEA), and by service.

MTCO2e means ‘metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent’ - this reflects the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide for any type of gas (e.g. methane) or by-products that were released to the atmosphere from the use of your resources.

AWS now matches its energy use from all its operations (data centres, buildings etc) with 100% renewable energy. After the Sustainability pillar was introduced to the Well-Architected Framework^[1] in Re:Invent 2021, AWS has more directly encouraged customers to choose sustainable choices when it comes to their infrastructure. For example:

Compute Efficiency:
- Choosing the latest AWS Graviton instances for your workloads can use up to 60% less energy than other EC2 instances^[2]
- Choosing AWS Inferentia and AWS Trainium for your ML/LLM workloads can provide 2x higher energy efficiency^[3]
Resource Optimisation:
- Right-sizing your EC2 instance size and number so that the memory and vCPU allotment is commensurate to your workload
- Using elastic auto-scaling groups to reduce running instances following periods of high load
- Using Spot instances and Flex runtime Glue jobs

Creating sustainable infrastructures naturally comes with trade offs, but considering your organisation’s long-term environmental impact is worth the time.

Customer Carbon Footprint Tool - Visualisations

Figure 1: A Recreation of Customer Carbon Footprint Tool Visualisations

References

[1] - Amazon Web Services (AWS). Sustainability Pillar - AWS Well-Architected Framework. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/sustainability-pillar/sustainability-pillar.html

[2] - Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS Graviton Processors. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/

[3] - Amazon Web Services (AWS). Generative AI Infrastructure at AWS. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/generative-ai-infrastructure-at-aws/