A First for the Cloud Industry — Platform.sh announces a Greener Region Discount offering

By offering a resource-usage discount when customers deploy to eligible greener data centers, Platform.sh expands its strategy to help customers reduce their carbon emissions.

Paris/San Francisco, 28 February 2024 - Platform.sh, a unified, secure, enterprise-grade platform for building, running and scaling web applications, today announced a first within the cloud industry: a 3% Greener Region Discount for customers when choosing a greener data center to deploy their applications on Upsun, the new PaaS from Platform.sh to be launched in April.

Despite its name, cloud computing is a very “grounded” activity, relying on physical data centers and servers, which accounts for approximately 3% of the electric power consumption in the world. Depending on physical location, the carbon intensity of these data centers varies drastically: it can be up to 30 times more intensive depending on whether the electricity primarily comes from coal and gas or from lower-carbon sources of electricity like hydro, solar, wind or nuclear.

This announcement confirms Platform.sh’s commitment to support developers and organizations who seek to deploy projects in regions generating less carbon. The Greener Region Discount is a financial incentive (fully funded by Platform.sh) built to align with customer financial and ESG interests. To incentivize users to reduce their carbon footprint the company will now offer a 3% discount on resource usage when selecting a greener region on Upsun.

Data centers that consume electricity that is less than 100 gCO₂eq/kWh are categorized as eligible. Based on this criteria, Platform.sh offers six incentive-eligible data center regions within five countries (France, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada and the U.S.) across four cloud providers (Azure, AWS, GCP and OVH) that are eligible under this incentive.

“With Upsun, we are offering our most efficient cloud orchestration, providing better alignment between cost optimization and carbon footprint. With the Greener Region Discount, we aim to contribute to making a real impact by bearing the cost of this incentive, thereby empowering our users to reduce their carbon footprint in the cloud while staying cost-efficient. This cements our commitment to decrease the effects of our activity on the environment, one step at a time, ” said Fred Plais, co-founder and CEO, Platform.sh.

Ensuring it provides the most up-to-date and accurate numbers to inform users to make the greenest choice possible without impacting performance, Platform.sh updates the carbon intensities for its regions using Electricity Maps data.

Leah Goldfarb, Environmental Impact Officer at Platform.sh: “Using a location-based approach, we display the underlying carbon intensity (in gCO₂eq/kWh) of the electrical grid supplying the individual data center. For our typical client, this is more accurately aggregated over a full 12-month period. As the grid carbon intensity fluctuates based on the day, time of day of the measurement and due to usage impacting the source of that energy, we will base our data on an annual 12-month average per year provided by Electricity Maps. This gives us a more accurate estimation of our clients’ usage and aligns with how our carbon audit is calculated.”

Upsun is currently in Open Beta, and the Greener Region Discount is available for all Open Beta users as of today. Upsun is set to be launched in April 2024.