Each quarter, the company gives out an Environmental Sustainability Action Award in recognition of an employee or team who has shown leadership, exemplifying how Microsoft and its employees can have a positive impact. These leaders help us improve not only the way we run our business, but also the ways our products and services can make a difference for our customers, partners and society. With the award comes a donation to an environmental charity of the winner’s choice.
This quarter, the Action Award is being given to Microsoft’s Enterprise Library Team for developing the Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi). WASABi provides a core ingredient for developers to automatically scale their Windows Azure applications based on rules developers define.
Many applications are provisioned with far more IT resources than they need, as a buffer to ensure acceptable performance and to protect against hardware failure. In many cases, the actual needs of the application are simply never measured, analyzed or reviewed. However, applications that are designed to dynamically grow and shrink their resource use in response to actual and anticipated demand are not only less expensive to operate, but are significantly more efficient with their use of IT resources than traditional applications.
One of the major advantages of WASABi is that developers can now easily build robust and resource efficient applications that can be intelligently scaled and throttled to save money and reduce environmental impact. Autoscaling demonstrates how Microsoft is putting an emphasis on energy efficiency across our business—from facilities, travel and data centers to making it easier to create energy efficient applications for the cloud.
I am hopeful that the Enterprise Library team’s work will be just the beginning as we continue to explore ways to increase IT energy efficiency. Congrats again to the Enterprise Library team on this award!
For more information about WASABi and Autoscaling read Mark Aggar’s blog here.