Effective February 13, 2024, two new capabilities are available in public preview to optimize Microsoft Azure emissions:
- Azure Carbon Optimization (preview): This new and free feature tool within Azure helps Azure developers and IT professionals to understand and optimize emissions stemming from Azure usage. By delivering insights into carbon emissions and providing actionable recommendations to enhance cloud efficiency, this tool assists you in reaching your cloud sustainability objectives.
- Microsoft Azure emissions insights (preview): Unify and analyze emissions data for Azure usage in Microsoft Fabric. With direct access to your Azure emissions data in Microsoft Fabric, you can query and drill down into Azure resource level emissions for advanced reporting and analysis.
Why is having insights into your emissions important?
The European Union set an overarching goal of achieving EU-wide greenhouse gas neutrality by 2050. Based on this, EU member states are creating increasingly strict guidelines (environmental, social, and governance (ESG) regulations) for organizations. More and more organizations must report on their sustainability numbers, and capital markets and consumers are becoming increasingly aware of sustainability in their purchasing decisions. This is why Microsoft releases new products (such as Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability or Microsoft Sustainability Manager) and features to support organizations in collecting and managing more ESG data and getting fuller visibility into their environmental impact.
Azure Carbon Optimization
Azure Carbon Optimization is in public preview and accessible via your Azure portal. It offers a comprehensive view of your cloud resources’ emissions, providing actionable recommendations to reduce your carbon footprint. Emissions calculation is based on billing and usage of these resources.
Gain access to resource-level emissions data, enabling proactive measures to mitigate emissions and track progress directly from the Azure Portal.
Utilizing the same carbon accounting methodology as the Emissions Impact Dashboard, Azure Carbon Optimization maximizes resource utilization while minimizing carbon emissions from the cloud. It simplifies carbon emission reduction into easily understandable terms, empowering users to make informed decisions.
The tool analyzes resource utilization to provide developers with recommendations for carbon savings, such as deleting or resizing underutilized resources. By implementing these suggestions, organizations can optimize Azure usage, reduce carbon emissions, and promote sustainable development practices, leading to both environmental and financial benefits.
Microsoft Azure Emissions Insights
Microsoft Azure Emissions Insights, now in public preview, becomes part of Microsoft Fabric’s sustainability data solutions.
It simplifies the analysis of Azure emissions data, providing Power BI dashboards for drilling down and comparing emissions across subscriptions and resources. This enables IT administrators to identify evolving patterns in Azure emissions and empowers data analysts to enrich the data with custom information, facilitating deeper insights into emissions by departments and seasonal variations. You can access it in Microsoft Fabric.
Prerequisites
- Microsoft Fabric license
- Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability APIs for Azure support EA Direct, MCA, and MPA accounts directly billed by Microsoft. Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) customers, legacy accounts, credits-based accounts, China enrollments, and Azure Government accounts are not supported. Verify your account type in the Azure portal.
- To enable access to your organization’s data, a relevant administrator must perform the initial setup. For Azure MCA accounts, a billing account administrator with roles like billing account reader, contributor, or owner is required. For Azure EA accounts, an enterprise administrator or enterprise administrator – read-only role is necessary. Check your role in the Azure portal.
More information
For the announcement, please visit: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/achieving-sustainable-growth-with-azure-and-finops-best-practices/.
For more information on Azure Carbon Optimization, please visit: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/carbon-optimization/.
To learn how to set up access for Azure Carbon Optimization, please visit: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/carbon-optimization/permissions.
For more information on Azure Emissions Insights, please visit: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/sustainability/sustainability-data-solutions-azure-emissions-insights.
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