How Platform.sh is Turning Customers Towards Greener Hosting
Often, people frame the correct action as a tradeoff. It's between sustainability and business. Putting executives in a tough spot. They must choose between the profits and sustainability.
Changing this view is critical. It is needed to make real progress in the fight against climate change. That's why we were thrilled with a new initiative from Revaia portfolio company Platform.sh. In February, the company announced a Greener Region Discount program linked to their new product, Upsun. It creates incentives for customers who choose to host their application in a data center with a lower carbon footprint.
At a recent event with Revaia investors, Platform.sh, Chief Marketing Officer Béatrice Harrois explained why they made the program. It shows how a company found where innovation and strategy meet. They used this to think differently about how to achieve sustainability goals.
Platform.sh arrived at this breakthrough by candidly acknowledging that technology adds to carbon emissions. They then decided to take the lead in addressing it. “Information technology represents 4% of the world's carbon emissions,” Harrois said. “That’s as much as aviation. We have a responsibility to try to reduce this and to help our customers reduce it as well.”
Serving developers
Platform.sh founded in 2015 provides automated DevOps tools and managed cloud services. They help to build, deploy, and scale applications easily and flexibly. Platform.sh simplifies and accelerates the application lifecycle— from development to deployment and iteration— while limiting the size of devops/infrastructure management team so they can focus on core software development.
Platform.sh now has 17,000 active developers using its Platform-as-a-service, and 7000 customers ranging from small to fortune 500 corporate companies.
The company was founded by CEO Fred Plais (who lives in Los Angeles), Ori Pekelman (who lives in Paris), and Damien Tournoud (who lives in San Diego). Platform.sh has a distributed work model with no official headquarters, meaning its 300 employees are located in 39 countries, Harrois said.
Since its launch almost a decade ago, Platform.sh has raised a total of $181 million. That includes a $140 million Series D funding round in June 2022 that was co-led by Revaia.
Platform.sh continues to evolve and expand its services. The company just launched Upsun. It's their new Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering. It takes the mission for sustainability to a new level.
Upgrading sustainability
With Upsun, Platform.sh is providing to developers a new experience to flexibly compose the infrastructure, optimize code, and efficiently select the resources to run their application.
In turn, Upsun opens up a new market for Platform.sh. It supports complex and diverse applications such as single-tenant or multi-tenant SaaS applications, API-based services or micro-services architectures with a large variety of languages and frameworks.
“We've broken down the package model of Platform.sh and offered customers the possibility to select resources completely à la carte. Platform.sh and Upsun’s business models and pricing are different, and that makes all the difference. It frees up an incredible potential market for us.”
Platform.sh has used the Upsun new pricing model as an opportunity. They have used it to introduce an incentive that supports their customers' effort to cut their carbon emissions.
Here’s how it works. Developers who sign up to Upsun get a 3% discount on resource usage if they deploy to one of the 6 greener regions the company identified. These data centers are located in regions generating less carbon emissions (IE, fewer fossil fuels, more renewable energy).
Platform.sh has selected 6 data centers in regions across 5 countries where electricity is consumed at less than 100 gCO₂eq/kWh: France, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, and the U.S, across 4 major cloud providers such as Azure, AWS, GCP, and OVH.
The company will continue to monitor and update the data used to select these regions by relying on Electricity Maps data. Because energy pricing can fluctuate, the company will use a 12-month average.
Beyond rewarding customers for selecting a greener region, Platform.sh is committed to providing visibility to its customers on their carbon footprint through yearly reports.
"We're proud to be among the first to give incentives to support our customers' efforts on sustainability. We hope this will set a precedent for other hosting companies," Harrois said.