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How the AWS Partner Network Is Enabling Sustainable Innovation
By Jonathan Chen, Tiffany Chen, and Mansi Vaghela | August 17 | in AWS Partner Network, Best Practices, Sustainability
By Jonathan Chen, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
Tiffany Chen, Solutions Architect Manager – AWS
Mansi Vaghela, Partner Solutions Architect, Startups – AWS
At AWS, we recognize that sustainability is a top priority for organizations seeking to transform toward sustainability—a commitment shared by the AWS Partner Network (APN). AWS is building a more sustainable cloud with data centers that deliver reliability and performance for customers while we continuously improve efficiency and reduce our environmental footprint.
AWS’s efforts are part of Amazon’s broader initiative to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040—10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. Achieving this goal requires AWS and partners to work together toward a more sustainable future. Customers come to AWS for architecture, best practices, and technical guidance to optimize workloads for lower carbon and cost, and to meet their sustainability goals. AWS Partners play a critical role in helping customers achieve sustainability goals on AWS. In this post, you will learn how AWS collaborates with partners to accelerate sustainability strategy through purpose-built solutions—creating business growth opportunities. Read on for APN programs and resources to accelerate your sustainability journey.
Unlocking the potential of sustainable solutions
As demand grows for meaningful corporate action on sustainability, organizations are looking for innovative ways to reduce their environmental impact. AWS understands the role of partners in this transition and equips them with resources and expertise to drive sustainable outcomes for our customers.
Your sustainability journey with the AWS Partner Network
Our partners wear many hats—trusted advisors, skilled implementers, or independent software vendors (ISVs)—when supporting customers’ sustainability journeys. As an ISV, you can showcase your solutions through the Sustainability-focused Solutions Library or AWS Marketplace.
AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog where partners list software, data, and services, including sustainability-focused offerings, so customers can discover solutions that address their specific sustainability challenges. Whether analytics tools to uncover new insights into resource consumption or cloud-native applications to improve energy efficiency, AWS Marketplace is a one-stop shop for sustainable innovation.
With differentiated data, AWS Marketplace integrates with AWS Data Exchange and the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI). ASDI advances sustainability research and innovation by reducing the time and cost to collect and analyze large datasets. To date, ASDI provides 217 open sustainability-related datasets on AWS. It also offers tools, guides, and open source to support experimentation and development of sustainability projects, backed by AWS promotional credits.
The AWS Solutions Library is a digital catalog of solutions and guidance for specific business and technical use cases. Partners contribute to our library and deliver solutions across domains and use cases, including sustainability—helping customers deploy sustainable products or software for their scenarios. For example, customers who need water quality reporting can access partner solutions under water scarcity & governance in the sustainability category of the AWS Solutions Library.
AWS has a three-part blog series to help you optimize AWS infrastructure for sustainability whether you work with compute, storage, or networking. The techniques in these posts help reduce overall resource consumption and improve the environmental impact of running applications on AWS. We also encourage partners and customers to establish a Cloud Center of Excellence—a framework to embed sustainable cloud practices in your organization.
Figure 1. Using AWS services to address customer sustainability goals
How AWS Partners can build for a sustainable future
At AWS, we work closely with partners to understand their sustainability goals and how those relate to their customers.
For example, your company can help customers adopt AWS Graviton-based EC2 instances, which use up to 60% less energy than comparable Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. To demonstrate Graviton expertise, AWS Partners can differentiate by earning an AWS Specialization. On the services path, through the AWS Service Delivery Specialization Program, you can become an AWS Graviton Specialization Partner. That unlocks benefits including badges and higher ranking in AWS Partner Solutions Finder. It also connects you with product teams who can help promote your AWS Graviton expertise and ability to deliver price and performance advantages on workloads to customers. On the software path, through the AWS Service Ready Specialization Program, your software product is validated as “AWS Graviton Ready.” This specialization signals that your product is designed and optimized to run seamlessly on AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instances.
Additional programs partners can pursue include the AWS Well-Architected Partner Program, which trains partners to run Well-Architected reviews across all six pillars for their customers. The Sustainability Pillar focuses on helping organizations improve sustainability strategy—specifically learning, measuring, and improving workloads using AWS best practices. Partners and customers run Well-Architected reviews with the sustainability pillar to emphasize efficiency as they improve workload sustainability.
Partners can also use AWS Guidance to find reference architectures, sample code, and technical content:
Query sustainability documents using generative AI for ESG reporting on AWS
Utility bill processing on AWS: use generative AI to automatically extract data from utility bills for Scope 2 emissions calculations
Environmental impact factor mapping on AWS: use generative AI to map environmental impact factors to measure product-level carbon footprint; this guidance draws on lessons from Amazon.com—a key AWS customer
Partner story: Carrier Global’s AI solution for sustainability goals
Figure 2. Carrier Abound logo
Carrier Global Corporation (Carrier) is an AWS Partner in ISV Accelerate, AWS SaaS Factory, and ISV Workload Migration, using AWS services to address sustainability challenges for their customers. Carrier continues to expand its solution portfolio to help customers meet sustainability objectives.
Carrier Abound™’s Digital Platform began as a pilot product introduced at re:Invent 2022 and is now listed on AWS Marketplace. A lightweight, easy-to-use interface helps customers interact with data collected from sensors, systems, and devices across commercial building portfolios.
In 2023, Carrier Abound launched Net Zero Management. It is designed to help global customers meet corporate sustainability goals by optimizing energy efficiency in buildings. Net Zero Management lets facilities staff track energy use (electricity, gas, water, and steam) and carbon footprint data for their building portfolios. The insights help customers spot energy consumption anomalies, identify where to invest, unlock energy savings, and validate ROI for efficiency initiatives.
By building on AWS AI services, Carrier gained the scale needed to roll the service out globally while maintaining consistent performance. Lexie Webel, head of AI for the Carrier product, said: “With just a few clicks and a few lines of code, we were able to make it available to our entire global customer base.”
Training and skills development
We also know that every sustainability transformation requires training and upskilling so your teams can design sustainable cloud architectures.
Hands-on sustainability experiences
Our Sustainable IT Immersion Day gives customers hands-on experience with AWS services through presentations and workshops. It covers an overview of AWS sustainability tools and best practices to measure and optimize IT infrastructure sustainability and accelerate sustainable innovation. As a services-path partner, you can learn to lead this immersion day for your customers or internal teams. Partners can visit How do I host an Immersion Day to plan and run a partner-led event.
AWS GameDays are collaborative learning exercises that test skills deploying AWS solutions to solve real problems in a gamified, risk-free environment across teams. Our Sustainability GameDay helps AWS users understand how to factor energy efficiency into AWS infrastructure. Partners can request an Immersion Day or GameDay by contacting their AWS Partner team for an AWS-led event.
Another resource, Well-Architected Labs focused on sustainability, helps your team learn, measure, and build using sustainable cloud architecture practices.
A shared commitment to a more sustainable future
We have explored partner paths, programs, and initiatives to help partners and customers begin transformations that meet sustainability goals. Through APN, AWS empowers our partners and drives innovation across industries and communities. To start selling on AWS Marketplace, register on this page and meet with AWS Marketplace specialists. To learn more about sustainability at AWS, visit AWS Sustainability, then schedule time with your AWS Partner team to see how AWS can help your organization innovate sustainably.