Level 5 - Inspiring
You’ve got there. You have achieved 24/7 CFE and require no more than 1% offsets to handle hard to shift embodied carbon. You have team level measurable goals (OKRs etc) for your CO2 measurements. You are optimizing for minimal CO2 emissions using your dynamic, real-time data. You and the services you rely on use real-time information including dynamic grid energy data to make rapid, quantitative decisions that allow you to be greener. This could (and probably will) be via a service you use rather than something you built yourself. You are already an SRE-aware organization that thinks in terms of error budgets for outages and downtime and you now think about carbon budgets in the same way. Using predictions based on factors such as weather and grid congestion, you change and move almost all of your workloads ahead of time to match your electricity requirements to local green power availability (aka 24/7 CFE) and any time sensitive workloads are highly optimized for minimal electricity use. You never cause hardware to become end of life either by lack of security patches or lack of backwards compatibility. You are ready for the energy transition and won’t be caught by surprise by sudden new rules or constraints.
| Axis | State |
|---|---|
| Whole organization energy commitments | already 24/7 CFE with no more than 1% offsets, monitored by a tight carbon error budget |
| Carbon footprint | it is as close to zero as achievable |
| CO2 equivalent metrics | Real time through easy standardized APIs together with projections |
| Server resource management | you have a rigorous carbon error budget including your scope 3 embodied carbon and all your resource use is tracked and managed through it |
| Energy resource management | you run 24/7 CFE with a rigorous carbon error budget |
| Minimize end user device embodied carbon waste (assume circular economy) | automated processes ensure backwards compatibility and security patches for all devices (software never kills a working device). Devices last forever al la Theseus’ ship/George Washington’s axe/Trigger’s broom |
| Minimize server hardware embodied carbon waste | hardware use is minimized by using full grid-aware integration with end user devices including phones, laptops, smart clothing, fridges… |
| Product management | your features are tracked against your scope 1/2/3 carbon error budget |
| Education | you train others in what you have achieved |