With over half of the global population residing in urban areas, cities are increasingly seeking sustainable transportation solutions. Amazon VGT2, a pioneering mobility initiative under the Volkswagen Group, is tackling these challenges by offering clean and efficient transportation services. Currently operational in Hamburg and Hannover, Germany, Amazon VGT2 utilizes AWS for their backend, data processing, analytics, and business intelligence tasks. Their ride-sharing service aims to enhance urban sustainability by reducing air pollution and alleviating traffic congestion.
This article explores how Amazon VGT2 leverages AWS to address three critical dimensions of cloud sustainability: sustainability THROUGH the cloud, IN the cloud, and OF the cloud.
Sustainability Through the Cloud at Amazon VGT2
Amazon VGT2 is making urban mobility smarter. Their vehicles do not adhere to fixed routes; instead, passengers with similar start and end points share rides on dynamically optimized paths. Occasionally, passengers may need to walk a block or two to designated pick-up locations, as the bus stops are predetermined in collaboration with local authorities.
Utilizing modern, fully electric vehicles designed for comfort, along with a user-friendly app for ride bookings, Amazon VGT2 partners with city officials to deliver an affordable, convenient, and sustainable transportation service. This collaboration aims to reduce individual car usage and enhance road network efficiency. Such efforts exemplify sustainability through the cloud, as Amazon VGT2 harnesses AWS technology to tackle broader ecological issues.
Sustainability through the cloud encompasses ecological, economic, and social dimensions. Amazon VGT2’s mission to redefine urban mobility not only provides an ecological solution that lowers emissions but also reduces transportation costs, leading to more pleasant communities. For more insights on urban mobility, check out this blog post.
Shared Responsibility Model for Sustainability
Sustainability is a collaborative effort between customers and AWS. AWS focuses on optimizing cloud sustainability by offering efficient shared infrastructure, water stewardship, and renewable energy sourcing. In contrast, customers are responsible for sustainability in the cloud, optimizing resource use and minimizing deployment requirements.
Sustainability in the Cloud at Amazon VGT2
Achieving sustainability in the cloud begins with understanding environmental impacts and setting sustainability targets. Goals can be met by enhancing resource utilization, eliminating waste, adopting more efficient hardware and software, and utilizing managed services. These strategies collectively reduce the environmental impact of cloud workloads. Just as Amazon VGT2’s vehicle engineers optimize bus components and energy consumption, their cloud specialists ensure algorithms and cloud usage align with best practices.
For instance, Amazon VGT2 employs serverless services, which allow infrastructure to scale down automatically during off-peak hours, optimizing resource use. Additionally, non-time-sensitive data is batched for hourly or daily processing, aligning service level agreements (SLAs) with sustainability objectives. Amazon VGT2 also runs larger analytics jobs during nights and weekends when energy demands are lower. By optimizing Spark parameters on their Amazon EMR cluster, they have reduced runtime from 17 minutes to just 2 minutes for certain jobs.
Amazon Kinesis buffers telemetric data from vehicles, with rate limits designed to smooth data consumption. This aligns with recommendations for optimizing workloads for asynchronous and scheduled jobs. The adoption of AWS Graviton2 instances, known for their energy efficiency and cost-effectiveness, further enhances their cloud sustainability.
Operating in Germany, Amazon VGT2 utilizes the AWS Frankfurt region for data processing and application hosting. This choice not only keeps data close to consumers but also considers the region’s energy mix. AWS Frankfurt is committed to leveraging Renewable Energy Credits and Guarantees of Origin to offset non-renewable energy usage.
For stateless workloads, Amazon VGT2 utilizes spot instances to boost cloud utilization, minimizing the sustainability impact of idle resources while reducing costs. Monitoring workloads with Amazon CloudWatch helps identify underutilized resources. Additionally, by correlating cloud metrics with business performance, they develop proxy metrics for sustainability, such as computing resources used per passenger ride or telemetric data stored per kilometer traveled. They are committed to long-term optimization of these metrics.
Amazon VGT2 also employs S3 Storage Lens for identifying and eliminating unused data in their Amazon S3 buckets, and they implement data lifecycle rules to transition infrequently accessed data to energy-efficient S3 Glacier storage. Finally, they automate deployments using Apache Airflow, ensuring their workloads remain current and allowing for experimentation and improvements.
These architectural and technology decisions showcase sustainability in the cloud.
Sustainability of the Cloud
While customers are responsible for sustainability in the cloud, AWS plays a crucial role in ensuring the cloud itself is sustainable. This begins with careful selection of data center locations to mitigate environmental risks such as flooding and extreme weather. AWS also prioritizes sustainable construction, collaborating with CarbonCure Technologies to incorporate recycled carbon dioxide into building materials, making structures stronger while permanently capturing CO2.
AWS is committed to responsible sourcing of hardware and encourages vendors to prioritize reuse and recycling of components. They also utilize in-house designed hardware, such as the AWS Nitro System, to extend the lifespan of devices through improved serviceability. Furthermore, AWS manages waste and decommissioned hardware responsibly.
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