If Amazon Web Services (AWS) truly wants to deliver on its environmental promises, it needs to make sustainable choices as easy and familiar for cloud customers as one-click shopping, according to RedMonk analyst James Governor.

Take AWS' customer carbon footprint tool, for instance. The provider says this tool makes it easier to calculate the carbon emissions associated with any digital services built or deployed on its cloud infrastructure.

But the calculator is a just an initial product with plenty of room for improvement, Governor wrote in a blog post.

One component that would be a welcome addition to the tool is an API that allows developers to build AWS' carbon tracking into individual apps and access that data through any command line tool or editor, he explained.

The cloud giant's carbon calculator is also missing a simple way to compare and model carbon intensity in different data center regions.

Instead, the tool is set up to illustrate the environmental benefits of AWS hosting compared to self-hosting, Governor said. "The real charm" will come when AWS customers can actually make sustainable decisions about their cloud workloads in addition to just measuring environmental impact, he added.

Even with these gaps, Governor acknowledged the positive impacts of AWS' sustainability efforts.

"It’s good to see AWS making information about carbon intensity more readily available to customers because it’s up to us to encourage Amazon to move farther and faster on carbon reduction," he explained. "We have to be the pressure we want to see in the world."

That sentiment has also been echoed by the cloud provider. "If you want to influence AWS, get our customers to move capacity to green regions," Adrian Cockcroft, AWS vice president of sustainability architecture, said at a Leading Edge Forum event.

AWS and its e-commerce counterpart are wildly successful because they both sell the same killer app — convenience. So if AWS makes it easier for its customers to reduce their carbon footprint, then customers probably will, Governor said.

"AWS touches pretty much every industry sector and company, and by giving us a lever to change its behavior, it’s giving us a lever by which we can, and will, change our own."

But to get to that point, consumers need to demand more from the cloud giant, Governor said. "We need to make it clear that Amazon needs to move further and faster."

For example, customers using AWS' carbon footprint tool should provide constructive feedback and ask for specific improvements to the tool. AWS product groups usually listen to feedback, especially when it's noisy, Governor said.

"AWS is obviously well placed to change customer behaviors at scale, but the onus is also on us to encourage that to happen," he concluded.

The cloud giant aims to report net-zero carbon emissions across all its operations by 2040 and to power its operations with renewable energy by 2025.