Workloads stay on x86 instances out of habit, even when cloud providers offer ARM-based alternatives with good performance per watt.
The fix you can use today
Build multi-architecture container images.
Benchmark a representative service on an ARM instance: throughput, latency, cost and, where you can, energy.
Move services where the numbers are better.
The Green Software Foundation suggests testing your software on other kinds of processor. GreenCode draws on these patterns when it checks software.
Tools that help
Docker build best practices (Docker): multi-stage builds, small base images and leaving build tools out of the final image
Cloud Carbon Footprint: estimates the energy and emissions of AWS, Azure and Google Cloud usage from billing and usage data
How GreenCode helps
GreenCode helps tackle this by mapping a running estate, rebuilding it as infrastructure as code and showing which services use the energy, including services barely running at all. More on this.
