The Government Digital Service (GDS) is planning to monitor the environmental impact of the GOV.UK One Login service.
It has entered a partnership with cloud sustainability specialist Greenpixie to track how much energy and water is needed in powering the servers every time someone uses the single sign-on to access a government service.
Greenpixie said that, as a result, the GDS team will be able to find out how its engineering decisions impact the emissions produced by the high energy cloud computing systems behind One Login. They will then make informed decisions aimed at reducing the service’s environmental impact.
This will be particularly important as One Login - developed as a single form of identity verification for government services – continues increasing its consumption of cloud computing services over the coming months to accommodate its rising number of users.
The move is intended to give GDS the observability needed to adopt more sophisticated cloud sustainability techniques and limit carbon emissions as use of One Login continues to scale up.
Leading by example
Minister for AI and Digital Government Feryal Clark said: “While we make the most of technology to overhaul public services, we must make sure we are leading by example in protecting our climate.
“Our work with Greenpixie will help give us the insight we need to keep a tight grip on environmental impacts as we use technology to save citizens valuable time and money while using our services.”
The initiative is the latest by GDS to develop the sustainable and efficient use of cloud infrastructure. This has included techniques such as the adoption of serverless architecture and a change in processor code.
Greenpixie said that its data has already found that the GDS policy to opt for cloud native architecture where possible has made it over six times more carbon efficient than the average enterprise with a similar level of usage.
