Scania has entered into a collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services as it looks to reduce its IT carbon footprint.
The year-long project will see AWS build sustainable IT solutions for Scania.
Scania has a connected fleet of around 500,000 rolling vehicles in customer operations and that number is rapidly increasing.
“Data-driven services and ever-increasing digitalisation call for more IT usage and companies must respond to manage the impact of IT on the environment,” the company said.
During Scania Hack, an internal hackathon, developers came up with an idea on how to minimise the environmental footprint of Scania’s IT services. An important idea was transparency of sustainability Key Performance Indicators, down to the application level. This enables each application team to gain insight into their individual sustainability impact.
The next step was to contact AWS, with which Scania was already working for cloud services. The team decided to leverage the transparency of the cloud to build KPIs with hourly granularity from AWS usage reports and service metrics combined with data provided by Scania.
Together with AWS solutions architects, developers from Scania will now work to develop a monitoring mechanism and dashboards will provide hundreds of application teams with a transparent overview of KPIs of their applications like “vCPU hours per active user”. Having these KPIs, each application team can work independently on potential optimisations.
The transparency and data captured allows Scania to determine which applications have the biggest impact by optimisations, for example by application size and utilisation. Since the cloud allows Scania to experiment with different compute configurations and automate the scale out and scale in as necessary, this is usually the first step to optimise towards less resources and higher utilisation.
Also, teams can switch to more energy efficient processors, including those custom-built by AWS, to increase power efficiency. By implementing more rigid lifecycle policies for the retention of data, teams can automatically delete data no longer needed and thereby reduce digital waste.
According to Scania, the longer-term vision is to create an efficiency rating of Scania IT solutions. To enable the most sustainable IT system possible, the team will start off by visualising the present environmental impact, create guidelines and a concrete, scalable solution, and share best practices with other AWS customers.
“IT is an essential part of Scania’s transformation journey to become a provider of sustainable transport solutions. As such, we have to minimise the footprint of IT,” said Jan Andries Oldenkamp, CIO at Scania.
“Any increased use of IT will otherwise add to the environmental impact of our transport solution ecosystem.”
