4.5 Avoid maintaining unnecessary virtualized environments or containers
Hosting, Infrastructure, and Systems
Reduce the number of unnecessary virtualized environments to save hardware utilization.
Criteria
- Unused environments:
Minimize the number of active environments, including virtualized environments (such as containers). Where applicable, also evaluate running services. Audit codebases and setups for unused branches, environments, and services and remove them as appropriate.- AWS WAF – SUS02-BP03 – Stop the creation and maintenance of unused assets
- GPF – General Policy Framework (PDF) – 3.7 – Architecture (Optimized Testing)
- GR491 – 3-8026 – Not In Use Equipment
- Optimize your container workloads for sustainability
- Toward sustainable software engineering
- United Nations SDGS – Goal 6 – Water & Sanitation
- United Nations SDGS – Goal 7 – Sustainable Energy
Benefits
- Economic
Removing unnecessary environments reduces the resources that must be provisioned. This reduces infrastructure, maintenance, and process costs. - Environment
Power and energy resources will be conserved from avoiding utilizing unnecessary environments and lowering carbon emissions will result. - Social Equity
Scaling back the usage of data centers reduces the need for new facilities that may bring negative community impacts and strain national resources.
GRI
- Materials: Low
- Energy: Low
- Water: Low
- Emissions: Low