Your platform choice can help save the planet!

The eCommerce industry isn't doing the environment any favors. We all know that. Shipping half-empty boxes worldwide and high return rates are just some things negatively affecting our planet.

The narrative usually revolves around what merchants should and shouldn't do to solve this, but one thing that definitely should be discussed more is what we, the vendors, can do to help you offer sustainable choices.  

When we built Brink Commerce API, sustainability was one of the core principles - and it still is.

A server in a data center consumes electricity, directly but also indirectly, to keep the temperatures down. And it needs lots of it. Bad for the planet, bad for your margins. Data centers are huge energy consumers, and most of the energy is wasted (but you still have to pay for it). We, therefore, looked for options that allowed us to build something more intelligent. And we found it.

Brink Commerce API is running on Serverless infrastrucrture. We don't have traditional virtual (or, even worse, physical) servers. Instead, we allocate machine resources on demand.

With Serverless, you utilize hardware and power resources much better. For example, our customers constantly use around 99% (compared to other "best-in-class" providers at ~80%) of their allocated capacity. It's not as scary as it sounds, though; Serverless enables us to change allocation dynamically within milliseconds as demand increases or decreases. So besides the ability to handle substantial traffic increases, customers can almost completely avoid wasting (or paying for) resources for unnecessary overhead or fixed just-in-case-capacity.

As a result, statistics show that the carbon footprint of a Serverless setup is almost 90% less than the enterprise average. That's making a difference - for real.

This modern technology is certainly not the only answer to the climate crisis, of course, but I am proud that we have built something that, at least, will move the industry in the right direction. We're hoping more vendors will follow.

Happy to tell you more. Get in touch!

/Patrik Antonsson, CRDO

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