New Relic

As part of its ongoing climate strategy, New Relic in 2023 set the goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2030. A key initiative was enhancing the sustainability of its own cloud operations, which account for the largest portion of its total emissions at 48.9% (Fiscal Year 2024).

To achieve this, New Relic deepened its longstanding collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) by leveraging the cloud leader’s robust sustainability commitments. Key highlights of the Amazon sustainability initiatives include 1/ The Amazon pledge to be a net-zero carbon company by 2040, 2/In 2023, Amazon matched 100% of its global electricity consumption with renewables; and 3/Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) powered by AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instances use up to 60% less energy than comparable EC2 instances for the same performance.

New Relic completed the migration of their workloads from on-premises data center facilities to the AWS cloud in 2023. New Relic transitioned applicable workloads to AWS Graviton-based services. As a result of this bold strategy, New Relic reported a 37% decrease in its carbon emissions for the migrated workloads and a 15-20% improvement in performance efficiency.

This post explores the details of this successful collaboration and provides a blueprint for partners to enhance the sustainability of their cloud journeys.

The New Relic-AWS Sustainability Strategy

A part of New Relic’s plan to meet its sustainability goals was the decision to completely exit its on-premises data centers by migrating to the AWS cloud. New Relic achieved this goal in October 2023. This shift is a part of New Relic’s strategy to achieve greenhouse gas emissions reductions across our operations and lay the groundwork for cloud optimization. By fully embracing the scalability and efficiency of AWS, New Relic improved the environmental sustainability of its infrastructure.

New Relic began building a cloud-first foundation which tapped into the energy-saving benefits of AWS Graviton processors. AWS Graviton is a family of processors designed by AWS to enable reductions in cloud infrastructure energy use and emissions while maintaining performance needs for customers. AWS enabled New Relic in its pursuit of green, high-performance cloud computing.

In March 2024, New Relic further cemented its sustainability leadership with the introduction of its innovative green operations (GreenOps) initiative. New Relic created a cross-functional team that hosts a monthly community for all engineers to discuss sustainable architecture, company-wide and industry-wide best practices, and new AWS Graviton instance releases. In parallel, there are internal services for teams to view their spend and usage at all times, so they can be aware of how efficiently they use their infrastructure.

New Relic made measurable progress toward more sustainable business practices by integrating sustainability principles throughout its operations and software development life cycle. They realized a 15-20% performance improvement across their development and operations workloads, achieving a more sustainable computing infrastructure for the entire technology stack.

Solution Overview

New Relic’s AWS Graviton adoption journey began in 2021 with evaluating the performance of their workloads on AWS Graviton2 instances, achieving a 15-20% performance boost over comparable EC2 instances. This success fueled further optimization.

When AWS Graviton3 launched in 2022, New Relic quickly adopted the new hardware, unlocking an additional 20% gain on m7g instances. New Relic then embarked on a phased migration from x86 to AWS Graviton. Over 15 months, the company deployed over 23,000 AWS Graviton servers and migrated 700+ services. As of July 2024, 64% of workloads run on AWS Graviton-based instances.

The transition to m7g instances further enabled New Relic to optimize worker clusters, streamlining a service from 80 to 18 workers. At scale, this reduced daily instances from 20,000 to 15,000-17,000, improving performance and cutting energy use. The enhanced core utilization and reduced data fragmentation enabled by AWS Graviton3 helped New Relic process data more efficiently while keeping costs low.

These combined efforts showcase how the collaboration between AWS and its customers can drive meaningful improvements in both performance and sustainability.

New Relic took the approach of centrally deploying AWS Graviton so that teams could test and migrate their services. AWS Graviton is part of their long-term containerization strategy to leverage Karpenter on Kubernetes clusters. Containerization has been core to their commitment to eliminate unused compute. Karpenter is the key tool that helps launch right-sized compute resources for each service’s needs.

Each quarter, New Relic selected the teams with the greatest opportunity to move to AWS Graviton and asked them to commit to moving their services. This built traction since the teams that migrated immediately saw the price/performance improvement on their monthly reporting. Individual team progression created organizational momentum to scale resulting benefits. They built an internal dashboard using New Relic’s telemetry data to show the AWS Graviton opportunity by service. This dashboard was governed by VP-level executives to illustrate savings opportunities for prioritization.

Underpinning this transformation was New Relic’s commitment to observability. As the company migrated to the new architecture, it was able to leverage its own platform to detect and remediate failures, observe ongoing trends, and analyze the overall health and performance of the platform. This deep visibility has been crucial in guiding the optimization efforts and unlocking the full potential of cloud migration.

Metrics and Impact

As of July 2024, New Relic has successfully migrated approximately 64% of its workloads to AWS Graviton-based instances, achieving an estimated 37% reduction in CO2e for those migrated workloads. This transition has not only improved performance by 15-20% but also resulted in significant cost savings of $9.6 million from May 2022 to July 2024.

Using the AWS Cost and Usage Report (AWS CUR) and the Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, New Relic tracked the carbon emissions for both on-premises and AWS instances. As of April 2024, New Relic was not only able to decrease its total normalized instance hours by 27.29%, but its carbon emissions dropped by 99.45%. This shows that New Relic was able to both decrease the total amount of compute needed and reduce the ratio of carbon emissions for its remaining compute.

New Relic has an array of plans to continue sustainability improvements across their organization. A few key areas are 1/ Focusing on deploying their workloads to energy-efficient regions. At present, there are 22 AWS regions that are attributable to 100% renewable energy, 2/ Continued focus on metrics on AWS Graviton adoption and CPU utilization efficiency across all teams; and 3/ Compute optimizations metrics for all New Relic and track against sustainability targets.

Conclusion

By leveraging AWS energy-efficient data centers and AWS Graviton processors, New Relic has been able to reduce the environmental impact of its cloud infrastructure and make progress towards its ambitious sustainability goals.

New Relic encourages all organizations to set and achieve science-based targets for sustainability. Companies can implement operational environmental initiatives to reduce emissions and advance combined sustainability goals.

AWS offers prescriptive guidance on design principles and best practices in the Sustainability Pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. To take the next steps towards sustainable development, start with our free AWS Skill Builder class, Sustainability Transformation with AWS and for additional details, refer to Sustainability with AWS Graviton.

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New Relic – AWS Partner Spotlight

New Relic is an AWS Specialization Partner and leading cloud-based observability platform built to create more perfect software. Many of the world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions, and create best-in-class digital experiences. The platform delivers exceptional reliability, operating at 99.95% uptime. New Relic processes three exabytes of data annually. Over five billion data points are ingested and 2.4 trillion queries are executed every minute across 75,000 active customers. The platform serves over 333 billion web requests each day. The median platform response time is 60 milliseconds.

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