Rapid growth at a digital company inevitably drives up resource and infrastructure needs, cloud in particular. For Younited, a European player in instant credit and online financing, this created a twofold challenge: absorbing growth while keeping both costs and environmental footprint under control.
We spoke with Hugo Mercier, Lead Developer at Younited, about the levers his team used and what other SaaS and fintech organizations can take from their experience.
Optimizing non-production environments
Younited's teams started with the environments that carried the least risk and were easiest to change: development and testing.
'We looked at what we actually needed in our dev and test environments. For some logs, a few days of retention is enough, and we don't need all the historical data. This let us cut storage without affecting the quality of our teams' work,' explains Hugo Mercier.
Pooling and rationalizing resources
The second major lever was resource pooling. At Younited, services such as Redis were consolidated onto shared instances instead of being spread out team by team, and virtual workstations were rationalized.
'We realized a lot of resources were running for no reason. By pooling them, we optimized usage, cut costs, and reduced our environmental footprint all at once', says Hugo Mercier.
Containerization and overall optimization
Younited has begun migrating to more containerized architectures. By centralizing application execution on managed services, the teams reduced resource fragmentation and improved overall utilization.
Experts regularly cite containerization as one of the advanced cloud architectures that reduce waste and make cloud services more efficient. Running workloads more densely on shared infrastructure is a lever many SaaS organizations can use to lower their energy footprint while gaining agility.
Daily monitoring and alerting
Finally, Younited built a culture of continuous cloud usage management, with regular consumption tracking and alerts on potential drift. This lets the team respond quickly to unusual usage before it has a lasting impact on costs and emissions.
'With daily monitoring, we know exactly where to step in. We used to sometimes react too late. Now we have continuous visibility into our consumption,' adds Hugo Mercier.
This proactive approach to managing cloud usage is increasingly seen as best practice for balancing performance and sustainability.
Results and replicability
On a like-for-like basis, the optimizations cut Younited's production cloud bill by around 10% and its overall bill across all environments by 7%, while reducing the carbon footprint by roughly 33%.
These results show what a structured approach can achieve when it combines concrete technical actions with regular usage monitoring.
Across the sector, the value of measuring and managing the carbon footprint of cloud usage is now recognized well beyond IT. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centers accounted for 1% to 1.3% of global electricity demand in 2022, a share expected to keep growing with the expansion of digital services and compute-intensive uses such as AI.
Hugo Mercier stresses that it was a team effort:
'This project wouldn't have been possible without everyone's involvement: developers, DevOps, QA, product, and management. It was a collective effort that transformed our practices for the long term.'
As demand for cloud resources rises quickly, for both traditional workloads and compute-intensive technologies like AI, this approach offers a model that can be applied across the digital ecosystem.
The IEA also projects that the growth of digital usage will push data centers' share of global electricity consumption even higher in the coming years, which makes optimizing cloud practices all the more strategic.