How the AWS Partner Network is Enabling Sustainable Innovation

By Jonathan Chen, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Tiffany Chen, Solutions Architect Manager – AWS
By Mansi Vaghela, Partner Solutions Architect, Startups – AWS

At AWS, we recognize sustainability as a top priority for organizations seeking to transform their organization to be sustainable, a commitment shared by the AWS Partner Network (APN). AWS is building a more sustainable cloud with data centers that provide customers with reliability and performance, while continuously improving efficiency and minimizing our environmental footprint.

AWS’ efforts are part of a broader initiative by Amazon to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040—10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. To meet this goal, it is important for AWS and its partners to work together towards a more sustainable future. Customers come to AWS for architecture, best practices, technical guidance to optimize workloads for carbon & cost reduction, and to achieve their sustainability goals. AWS Partners are key in helping customers meet their sustainability goals on AWS. In this blog, you will learn how AWS collaborates with its partners to empower sustainability strategy acceleration through purpose-built solutions; which helps create business growth opportunities. Keep reading to learn about APN Programs and resources to help accelerate your sustainability journey.

Unleashing the Potential of Sustainable Solutions

As the urgency for businesses to take meaningful action on sustainability intensifies, organizations are seeking innovative ways to reduce their environmental impact. AWS recognizes the role of our partners in this transformation, and equips them with resources, and the expertise to drive sustainable outcomes for our customers.

Your Sustainability Journey with AWS Partner Network

Our partners play multiple roles – trusted advisors, skilled implementors, or independent software vendors (ISVs) when supporting the customer sustainability journey. As an ISV, you can showcase your solutions through the Sustainability-focused Solutions library or the AWS Marketplace.

The AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog that allows partners to list their software, data, and services offerings, including sustainability-focused ones, allowing customers to discover solutions that address their unique sustainability challenges. Whether it is data analytics tools that uncover new insights into resource consumption or cloud-native applications that optimize energy efficiency, the AWS Marketplace provides a one-stop-shop for sustainable innovation.

With data in particular, AWS Marketplace is integrated with AWS Data Exchange and the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI). ASDI has a mission to accelerate sustainability research and innovation by minimizing the time and cost required to acquire and analyze large datasets. To-date, ASDI offers 217 sustainability-related open-source datasets on AWS. It also provides tools, tutorials, and open-source code to support experimentation and development of sustainability-related projects, enabled by AWS promotional credits.

AWS Solutions Library is a digital catalog that offers purpose-built solutions and guidance to address business and technical use cases. Partners contribute to our library and provide solutions in different areas and use cases, including sustainability – making it easy for customers to deploy sustainability products or software for their use cases. For instance, customers that need water quality reporting can access partner solutions in the water scarcity & stewardship section in the sustainability category of the AWS solutions library.

AWS has a three-part blog series to guide you in optimizing your AWS Infrastructure for Sustainability whether you are working with compute, storage, or networking. The techniques in these blogs help reduce overall resource consumption and improve the environmental impact of running applications on AWS. We also encourage our partners and customers to establish a Cloud Center of Excellence – a framework that ensures sustainable cloud practices adoption into your organization.

Figure 1. How to Use AWS Offerings to Address Customer Sustainability Goals

How AWS Partners can Build for a Sustainable Future

At AWS, we work closely with our partners to understand their sustainability goals and how it relates to their customers.

For example, your company can help customers use AWS Graviton-based EC2 instances which uses 60% less energy than comparable Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. To demonstrate their expertise in AWS Graviton, AWS Partners can differentiate themselves by achieving an AWS Specialization. Within the services path and through the AWS Service Delivery Specialization Program, you can become an AWS Graviton Specialization Partner. This achievement unlocks benefits including a badge and improved ranking in AWS Partner Solutions Finder. It also connects you to the product team who can help promote your AWS Graviton expertise and ability to realize the price and performance advantages across workloads to customers. Within the software path and through the AWS Service Ready Specialization Program, your software product will be validated as AWS Graviton Ready. This specialization indicates your product is designed and optimized to work seamlessly with AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instances.

Additional programs that partners can join include the AWS Well-Architected Partner Program which trains partners on how to perform Well-Architected Reviews on all six pillars for their customers. The Sustainability Pillar focuses on helping organizations improve their sustainability strategy – specifically around learning, measuring, and improving workloads using AWS best practices. Partners and customers conduct these well-architected reviews with the sustainability pillar to emphasize the importance of efficiency to improve workload sustainability.

Partners can also leverage AWS Guidance to find prescriptive architectural diagrams, sample code, and technical content:

• Querying Sustainability Documents Using Generative AI (GenAI) for ESG Reporting on AWS
• Guidance for Utility Bill Processing on AWS: using GenAI to automatically extract utility bills for Scope 2 emissions.
• Guidance for Environmental Impact Factor Mapping on AWS: using GenAI to map environmental impact factor to measure product-level carbon footprint; this is based on learnings from Amazon.com as a key AWS customer.

Partner Story: Carrier Global’s AI Solutions for Sustainability Goals

Figure 2. Carrier Abound Logo

Carrier Global Corporation (Carrier) is an AWS Partner in the ISV Accelerate, AWS SaaS Factory, ISV Workload Migration Programs who leverages AWS services to solve sustainability challenges for their customers. Carrier constantly expands its portfolio of solutions to empower its customers to meet their sustainability goals.

Carrier Abound™’s Digital Platform started as a pilot product, presented at re:invent 2022, and is now listed on AWS Marketplace. The streamlined, user-friendly interface makes it simpler for customers to interact with the data collected from various sensors, systems and equipment within commercial building portfolios.

In 2023, Carrier Abound launched its Net Zero Management offering. It is designed to help global customers meet their corporate sustainability goals by optimizing the energy efficiency in their buildings. Net Zero Management allows building management personnel to monitor their building portfolio’s energy (electricity, gas, water and steam) usage and carbon footprint data. The gathered insights help customers identify energy consumption outliers, determining areas for investment, which helps unlock energy savings and validates return on investment across all efficiency efforts.

By building with AWS AI services, Carrier has the scalability required to extend this service globally while maintaining consistent performance. Carrier’s Product AI Lead, Lexie Webel, said “With just a few clicks and a few lines of code, we were able to make it available for our entire global customer base.”

Training and Enablement

We also understand that with every sustainability transformation, training and enablement is needed to upskill your team to understand how to design sustainable cloud architectures.

Sustainability hands-on experience

Our Sustainable IT Immersion Day provides customers with hands-on experience using AWS services through presentations and workshops. It covers an overview of AWS sustainability tools and best practices in order to measure and optimize the sustainability of IT infrastructure and accelerate sustainable innovations. As a partner on the services path, you can learn to lead this immersion day for your customers or for your internal teams. Partners can visit How do I host an Immersion Day to learn how to plan and run a partner-led event.

AWS GameDays are a collaborative learning exercise that tests skills in implementing AWS solutions to solve real-world problems in a hands-on gamified, risk-free environment between teams. Our Sustainability GameDay enables AWS users to understand how to be mindful of energy efficiency on our AWS infrastructure. Partners can request an Immersion Day or GameDay by contacting their AWS Partner team to organize an AWS-led event.

Another resource of ours, the Sustainability-focused Well-Architected Labs, helps your team learn, measure, and build using sustainable architectural best practices on the cloud.

A Shared Commitment for a More Sustainable Future

We explored partner paths, programs, and initiatives to guide Partners and customers to embark on a transformative journey to meet their sustainability goals. Through the APN, AWS empowers our Partners, fostering innovation across industries and communities. To start selling on AWS Marketplace, register on this page and meet with an AWS Marketplace expert. To learn more about sustainability at AWS, visit the AWS Sustainability webpage, then schedule a meeting with your AWS Partner team to learn how AWS can help your organization innovate sustainably.