Reducing collective carbon emissions from cloud activities

Paris/San Francisco, 17th March 2022 - Platform.sh, a unified, secure, enterprise-grade platform for building, running and scaling web applications, has worked with Greenly to calculate its carbon emissions to provide a clear picture to its customers.

Climate change is real. The IT sector is estimated to be responsible for 4% of the global GES emissions, a bigger impact than the airline industry already, and it is growing much faster. Platform.sh is committed to reducing its impact on the environment, alongside its customers, as a signatory to the Climate Act.

Platform.sh limits environmental impact by reducing its hardware and energy usage, then optimising its respective emissions and offsetting what is leftover.

Platform.sh reduces energy use by:

• Application Performance Monitoring—optimising individual apps performance means using fewer resources to run the same workloads.
• Increasing server density—servers are often under-utilised and under-optimised, with anything between 60-80% of their capacity going to waste. Platform.sh uses proprietary technology to increase density up to 12 times and cut energy usage up to 10x.
• Rightsizing and scaling—No more overprovisioning. Platform.sh works with businesses to understand their needs today and allow them to grow fast and responsibly.

Platform.sh optimises infrastructure to reduce emissions by:

• Supporting multiple cloud providers—optimising infrastructure providers offer different advantages, including better Power Usage Effectiveness. Customers can choose the cloud providers that offer the most benefits, where it matters.
• Using the right location—data center location can make a huge difference to CO₂e emissions. For example, a datacenter in Sweden, using renewable energy, emits ten times less CO₂e per kWh than one powered by coal-generated electricity in Germany.

The rise of cloud services and cloud hosting makes it easy to forget about certain carbon costs—but any business aiming to reduce emissions must understand its complete carbon footprint. To enable this, Platform.sh is improving its environmental impact model and opening it to its customers, allowing them to take impactful action.

“We have a responsibility to not just be a sustainable business, but to ensure everything we do enables our customers to be sustainable too—they need to be able to understand their impact to either reduce it or offset it,” said Fred Plais, CEO, Platform.sh. “In the past it was common to improve performance by “throwing more metal” at it—that is, to use more and better hardware. This approach is fundamentally flawed, solving nothing in the long run, and contributing to environmental damage.”

Platform.sh is accelerating its efforts for the decarbonization and the environmental transition of the economy thanks to the France 2030 public investment plan. This funding helps us to continue our R&D in order to further reduce the environmental impact of our activities and those of our users

About Platform.sh

Platform.sh is a cloud-based web application hosting platform, a leader in the management of fleets of websites and applications. Its innovative deployment platform allows teams in charge of eCommerce sites, media sites, innovative and high-traffic applications to focus their efforts on developing and improving their applications, without having to worry about infrastructure issues (scalability, continuous deployment, maintenance, security, 24/7 monitoring, etc.). Platform.sh is available in Europe, the United States and Asia, through global partnerships with AWS, Google, Azure, Orange and OVHcloud.

The company, winner of the European Commission's H2020 program, recently recognized by Numeum as part of the Top 250 for its international growth, member of the French Tech 120 and Gaia-X and certified "Great Place to Work", has its head office in Paris (France) and San Francisco and counts among its customers prestigious brands such as the Financial Times, Gap, Unity3D, Adobe Magento, Orange, Hachette, The British Council.

For more information, please contact:
CCgroup for Platform.sh
Ryan O’Leary / Matthew Denby (UK)
T: +44 7890 049769
E: platform.sh@ccgrouppr.com