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: Human-testable
Minimize the number of active environments, including virtualized environments (such as containers). Audit codebases for unused branches and environments 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