Modernization to facilitate energy customers building secure, scalable, and sustainable business

In the energy industry, some of the most common business drivers for moving IT workloads to the cloud are lowering total cost of ownership (TCO), increasing innovation, maintaining the security of their data, and reducing environmental impact through meeting sustainability goals. Amazon Web Services (AWS) works alongside energy customers to meet these goals so that they can take advantage of the benefits that the cloud offers, such as increased agility, cost savings, and lower energy consumption. In this blog post, we will specifically expand on the TCO and sustainability business drivers and provide pathways for energy customers to help meet these goals through the modernization of their Microsoft-based IT workloads.

Trends and business drivers for the energy industry

Reduce carbon footprint

The energy industry is facing increased pressure to reduce its impact on the environment while continuing to maintain revenue and profit targets. This is top of mind in particular for industry executives because they are accountable to disclose specific data related to emissions, energy usage, and environmental impact from investors, regulators, and customers.

Many energy companies have signed the Climate Pledge, becoming increasingly conscious of environmental issues and adopting aggressive goals toward decarbonization. Renewable energy technologies are also becoming more cost effective, which increases pressure on energy companies to further reduce cost, innovate faster, and build their business on sustainable energy resources.

Amazon has announced several strategic energy industry partnerships to help customers reach their goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and to improve operational efficiency of pipelines. AWS can provide sustainable energy solutions to end users and help deliver the societal need for the energy transition. Cepsa reduced energy consumption for its downstream operations by 2 percent, improved throughput by 2.5 percent, and reduced CO₂ emission by 1,500 metric tons per year by migrating to the cloud.

Over the last 100 years, the energy-production-industry business model has been to generate electricity primarily through fossil fuels, hydroelectric, and nuclear and then sell it to customers. The emergence of alternative energy sources, new technologies, and an increasingly competitive landscape is transforming the industry’s approach toward technology and innovation. To meet the business goals of energy companies, AWS provides a foundation facilitating the transition to a more sustainable energy future.

Migrating to the cloud is just the start of the journey for many customers who are continuing to realize the ongoing benefits of the cloud through progressive modernization of their applications, data, and infrastructure. AWS has been working alongside customers to modernize their Microsoft-based workloads since 2008 so that customers can accelerate the transformation of the applications that power their business.

Reduce back-office expenses

Companies that have completed their migrations are unlocking new insights for proactive risk management and revenue generation. Migrating to the cloud avoids the costs of an on-premises system and helps achieve near-real-time decision-making to optimize operations and save more money. BP lowered costs and improved performance by 40 percent by migrating their SAP workloads to AWS. BP has sped up calculations and reduced risk in decision-making. GE Oil & Gas migrated over 500 applications to AWS, reducing IT overhead and facilitating digital transformation. Through migrating and modernizing, TC Energy has increased its overall daily natural gas throughput volume by using an anomaly-detection engine, eliminating additional capital expansion, and leading to increased revenue. By reducing cost and technical debt, TC Energy can better develop innovative solutions to help lessen its environmental impact.

What is modernization of Microsoft-based workloads?

At AWS, modernization is defined as the process of progressively transforming existing applications and infrastructure into higher-value, cloud-based services that facilitate new business capabilities, accelerate innovation, and reduce technical debt. Customers who modernize often look to address needs such as reducing their total cost of ownership (TCO), reducing their reliance on commercial software licenses, or accelerating innovation. Companies can realize 30–50 percent in cost savings when modernizing their workloads, freeing up resources for investment in activities that differentiate their business.

With Microsoft-based workloads, modernization is further refined to include any transformation that removes the need for Windows or Microsoft SQL Server from the architecture and replaces them with open-source or cloud-based technologies. There are two primary types of modernization for Microsoft workloads:

• Application modernization: This is the case of refactoring applications with a requirement for Windows, such as applications using .NET Framework to instead use modern .NET, which can run on Linux.
• Database modernization: This is the case of moving away from using SQL Server to open-source, cloud-based databases, such as Amazon Aurora (either PostgreSQL– or MySQL-compatible), which is designed for high performance and availability at global scale, or Amazon DynamoDB, a fast, flexible NoSQL database service for single-digit millisecond performance at virtually any scale.

AWS provides Modernize Windows Workloads with AWS as an overview of the benefits and pathways for modernization of Microsoft-based workloads and customer success stories.

Pathways for sustainability

An increasing number of organizations are setting sustainability targets in response to changes in government regulations, the competitive landscape, and demand from customers, employees, or investors. Teams at all levels across energy companies are seeking ways to contribute directly to the organization’s sustainability goals. By cofounding the Climate Pledge, a commitment to be net zero carbon by 2040, Amazon has made a commitment to sustainability. Amazon has a path to power all operations by 100 percent renewable energy sources by 2025, passing on these sustainability benefits to its customers. When companies bring workloads to AWS, they can reduce their carbon emissions by up to 88 percent because of the environmental economy of scale of the AWS global infrastructure. Organizations use, on average, 77 percent fewer servers, 84 percent less energy, and a 28 percent cleaner mix of power in the AWS Cloud versus their own data centers. For added benefits, modernized workloads running on Linux that use the ARM-based AWS Graviton processor–based instances use up to 60 percent less energy than comparable x86-based instances while getting up to 40 percent better price performance, helping to achieve both sustainability and TCO goals. AWS Graviton processors are designed by AWS to deliver optimal price performance for cloud workloads.

AWS customers are familiar with digital transformation, and many have learned how to use the cloud to increase innovation to build new products and services for their customers. Now, customers are undertaking a sustainability transformation, focusing on reduced environment impact by lowering energy usage and carbon emissions.

The cloud helps reduce the carbon footprint of customers’ IT workloads by using shared resources, such as networking, power, cooling, and physical infrastructure. AWS also helps customers rightsize their instances through the Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA), setting them up to use only the resources actually required, minimizing the carbon footprint of their Microsoft workloads. In addition to rightsizing instances, the OLA helps the customer determine the most optimal way to use existing qualifying licenses in the cloud.

Modernizing Microsoft workloads on AWS by moving to cloud-based services provides a path for customers to build an energy-efficient business and meet sustainability targets. By using the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, customers can visualize the impact on carbon emissions that they have when using AWS. The blog post Increasing sustainability for your Microsoft workloads on AWS outlines best practices for applying sustainable design principles to Microsoft workloads.

Modernization pathways to help energy customers with business impact

When companies consider modernizing their workloads, a best practice is to begin with the business outcomes that they hope to achieve and then work backward to choose the solutions that will help them get there.

Rehost

For some companies, the first step on the path toward modernization is to rehost their workloads. This involves migrating existing servers that host a company’s applications and databases to infrastructure in the cloud, such as virtual machines running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. For others, the path to modernization might be to replatform and refactor their applications and databases directly to cloud-based services.

Replatform

After having migrated their infrastructures and applications to the cloud, energy customers can move applications and databases to managed platforms, thus reducing the overhead of managing infrastructure, such as patching servers or database backups.

Applications that have a requirement for Windows can be containerized to Windows-based containers. This helps with both sustainability and TCO by allowing applications to use compute resources more efficiently, which reduces the overall cost and requires a smaller footprint in the cloud. AWS provides AWS App2Container, a command-line tool for migrating and modernizing Java and .NET web applications into container format. AWS App2Container provides blueprints for running containerized workloads using both Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed Kubernetes service.

Teams can replatform their SQL Server databases to Amazon RDS for SQL Server, a managed service that allows customers to run SQL Server workloads in the cloud without having to manage servers, patching, and backups. Amazon RDS for SQL Server instances can be rightsized to meet the needs of the workload, reducing the overall cost and compute resources that are required and helping with both sustainability and TCO goals.

Refactor

Refactoring helps teams to transform their applications to modern, cloud-based, and open-source compatible services. This helps to reduce TCO by eliminating the need for commercial software licensing and using the scalability of these services so that only the required resources for the current load need to be provisioned.

Refactoring applications helps customers meet their sustainability goals by helping to reduce the amount of energy that is required for their workloads. For instance, customers who refactor their applications so they can run on ARM can use AWS Graviton processor for their compute. Several examples of this include:

• refactoring .NET Framework applications to use an open-source version of .NET, such as .NET 6.0 .NET is optimized for both Linux and ARM, allowing those workloads to reap the performance and cost savings of AWS Graviton processor. Customers can run their .NET applications on AWS Graviton processor–based containers in AWS Fargate—a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine—or using AWS Graviton processor–based functions in AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service, in their serverless architecture. Modern .NET-based applications can take advantage of the improved performance of AWS Graviton processor with little to no change of their code.
• refactoring databases to use Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL- or MySQL-compatible databases, based on AWS Graviton processor instances. Customers who want to continue to use SQL Server libraries in their applications can optionally use Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL, which can minimize the code changes required to move to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.

Conclusion

Organizations in a wide variety of industries are modernizing their applications and databases on AWS to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud. Customers can undertake the modernization pathways that we have defined progressively in stages or all at once, depending on the workload and overall readiness to modernize. In the energy industry, each customer journey is unique for modernization, depending on the needs and challenges faced by the organization. AWS has created offerings to support customers through their modernization projects and journeys. AWS works alongside customers wherever they are in their journeys, providing tools, services, programs, and expertise so customers can meet their sustainability goals.

If your organization is interested in starting its modernization journey, please reach out to us at aws-mod-gtm@amazon.com.