5 Azure Sustainability Best Practices: Lower Carbon Footprint

Lower consumption reduces energy use and cloud spend, so cost savings and sustainability often go hand in hand. Yet, many organisations assume everything is fine once the cloud is running. SLAs are met, patches are applied, and budgets appear on track. In reality, cloud waste is common. 

Most teams don’t fully understand how cloud billing works or how small inefficiencies accumulate. Even if it’s one penny off, metrics might say it’s fine, but actual costs and environmental impact can remain high. 

Understanding and managing cloud sustainability helps you reduce cloud waste, lower costs, and reduce your carbon footprint. 

5 best practices for sustainability in Azure 

Microsoft Azure states that to make workloads more sustainable, it is required to work on cost optimisation, reducing carbon emissions and optimising energy consumption.  

We’ve compiled 5 quick tips you can use for your workloads in Azure to get a head start:  

1. Understanding your emissions 
2. Use shared resources instead of dedicated resources  
3. Use PaaS or serverless workloads 
4. Select the most economical and green region 
5. Right-size applications 

Now, let’s dive deeper into each: 

1. Understanding your emissions 

Before you can reduce your carbon footprint, you need to know where it comes from. Measuring your sustainability efforts is the first step.  

Azure Carbon Optimization tool helps developers, architects and all IT teams to track emissions from cloud usage across Azure resources and subscriptions.  

Source: Microsoft

It shows the carbon impact of your workloads and gives practical recommendations to make them more efficient. For example, it provides actionable recommendations based on resource utilisation, such as deleting or resizing underutilised resources. 

Using this tool, you can link your operational decisions to real sustainability results and make your cloud operations greener and more cost-effective. Azure Carbon Optimization tool follows the same carbon accounting methodology as the Emissions Impact Dashboard.  

2. Use shared resources instead of dedicated resources  

Azure gives you two main ways to run workloads: shared or dedicated resources. 

• Shared resources: These are platform-level services that run on multi-tenant infrastructure, like Azure App Service, Azure Storage, or Azure SQL Database. Your workloads share the same physical hardware as other customers, but your data and execution environment remain isolated within your tenant. They are often ideal for small projects. You control how much storage you need and can scale up as usage grows. Because resources are pooled, Azure can use its hardware more efficiently. Fewer idle servers → lower energy use → lower costs for you.
• Dedicated resources: Are reserved for single tenants/subscriptions, often best for production environments that need guaranteed resources (CPU, memory, or storage capacity). While that isolation improves predictability, it also means part of the compute might sit unused while still consuming power and adding cost without added value. 

For most workloads, shared resources offer the best balance of cost, flexibility and sustainability as you get performance when you need it, without having to pay for idle capacity.

Dedicated resources, on the other hand, only make sense when strict compliance or isolation is required. For everything else, shared is the smarter, greener choice. 

3. Use PaaS or serverless workloads 

Another way to reduce your carbon footprint and become more cloud-efficient is by moving from IaaS to PaaS services and serverless workloads whenever possible. 

When you use PaaS or serverless, Azure handles the underlying hardware and scaling automatically, which allows you to focus on delivering real customer value. In addition, you will only use compute when your app or function actually runs. That means no idle servers burning energy or generating unnecessary costs. 

It’s also a cleaner model for reporting. PaaS and serverless services are designed to share resources efficiently across tenants, which lowers both your carbon footprint and your cloud spend.  

4. Select the most economical and green region 

Where you place your Azure resources matter: try to become “geo-efficient” by deploying your Azure resources in greener data centres. Not all Azure regions are the same.  

The Nordics, for example, are often greener regions that are better for the environment. And it’s not only because of the CO2 footprint; it’s also about money. In the Azure Portal, you can check for every region and see that some data centres have, for the same compute power, a different price and a different sustainability footprint. 

The difference can be significant: North Europe is on average around 8% cheaper than West Europe, while also running on a greener energy mix. So you can check based on money and you can check on sustainability. 

By choosing a region that’s both cheaper and greener, you automatically reduce waste and lower your carbon footprint. Less spend means less energy consumed. 

5. Right-size applications 

Many Azure environments grow quietly over time. Resources are created, used for a while, only to be left untouched for long times. Meanwhile, newer and more efficient generations of those same resources are released — often at a lower price.  

Each new Azure generation (for example, VM series marked as v4 or v5) delivers more performance per euro and per watt. That means you can get more CPU power while consuming less energy and paying less for it.

Yet many workloads still run on older SKUs simply because they haven’t been reviewed in years. That’s why it is important to right-size your workloads.

Review your existing compute, storage, and database configurations and identify underutilised or outdated resources. Moving workloads to newer SKUs or scaling them to actual demand reduces waste, not only in carbon emissions, but also in cost. 

Bonus tip: throw things away 

Another tip is to reduce your CO2 footprint by recycling or reducing energy, and by using sustainable designs that you can reuse.

Sustainable does not always mean keeping something running; you can also discard it. For example, if you stop using a resource, you can remove that footprint from the Azure data centres. 

Closing thoughts 

Sustainability isn’t just about reducing carbon footprint and CO2; it also drives cost efficiency, performance, and operational resilience. By applying these five best sustainability practices, you can make your Azure environment greener and achieve more cloud efficiency. 

Try to start with small, actionable steps like creating a simple project to raise awareness in your IT environment. Or maybe start by checking if you can make one initiative to remove unused resources (like automatically shut down idle VMs). 

Becoming more sustainable doesn’t mean you have to use the cloud less.

It’s about using the cloud more efficient, rather than leaving the “lights on” unnecessarily in your environment.