How Milieudefensie Cut Carbon Emissions and Deployment Times by Moving to Leafcloud

Company: Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands)
Challenge: Self-hosted infrastructure with lengthy deployments and misaligned environmental impact
Solution: Migration to Leafcloud’s sustainable infrastructure
Results: Significant CO₂ reduction, deployment times slashed from hours to minutes, improved reliability

Fighting Climate Change While Contributing to It

Milieudefensie is the largest environmental organization in the Netherlands, mobilizing citizens, pressuring governments, and holding corporations accountable on climate action. With roughly 90,000 members, they’ve led landmark legal victories—including forcing Shell to align with the Paris Agreement—and continue pushing for systemic change on climate justice, nature conservation, and pollution reduction.

For their team of about 100 employees, the mission extends beyond campaigns. “From a campaign perspective, we’re deeply concerned about the environment, not just from support services,” explains their system administrator, part of a small IT team managing everything from laptops and servers to databases and email. “We’re constantly seeking energy-saving measures, recycling solutions, and even small changes, like recently switching to organic coffee in the vending machines. With IT, we’re not just aiming for a computer that works for employees—we also look for societal benefits. Choosing a sustainable alternative is almost always possible.”

But there was an uncomfortable reality: their self-hosted Proxmox environment meant the digital tools they used to fight climate change were contributing to the problem. Traditional data centers are energy-intensive, and running your own infrastructure comes with an environmental footprint that didn’t align with their core mission.

From Self-Hosted Overhead to Sustainable Infrastructure

The small IT team was facing operational inefficiencies that went beyond environmental concerns. Deploying new servers could take hours, hardware management ate up time and resources, and the risk of large-scale outages loomed over their operations.

Leo Hart from Enabl.ist, who was advising them on their ICT strategy, introduced them to Leafcloud—not as just another cloud provider, but as one that had fundamentally rethought how cloud infrastructure impacts the environment.

“After meeting with Leafcloud, it was clear the way they’ve solved the environmental issues makes a real difference,” their team recalls. “It was a good match for Milieudefensie and our environmental goals.”

Unlike traditional providers that bolt sustainability onto existing infrastructure, Leafcloud was designed from the ground up differently. By reusing waste heat from servers to heat homes and buildings, and powering operations with renewable energy, Leafcloud tackles the core environmental problem of computing: wasted energy becomes a resource instead of a burden. For an organization whose entire mission is environmental advocacy, this wasn’t just attractive—it was essential.

Ansible, OpenStack, and Minutes-Fast Deployments

The migration required learning new tools but proved more straightforward than anticipated. Milieudefensie chose Ansible for server provisioning, which meant getting familiar with OpenStack, Leafcloud’s underlying infrastructure platform.

“The main thing was learning OpenStack,” they note. “After that, things have been easy and we deploy new servers fully in minutes with Ansible.”

They successfully migrated their entire technology stack from Proxmox to Leafcloud. What used to take hours now takes minutes. Performance improved noticeably, and the risk of large-scale outages dropped significantly. The operational wins were immediate and tangible—especially meaningful for a small team where every hour counts.

Three Problems Solved, One Mission Aligned

When asked what Leafcloud solved for them, the answer was clear:

Slashing CO₂ emissions. Their infrastructure now runs on renewable energy while reusing waste heat to warm homes. They’ve significantly reduced emissions from their digital operations—a change they can quantify and communicate.

Eliminating hardware headaches. No more failed drives, hardware refresh cycles, or capacity planning for physical servers. That responsibility shifted to Leafcloud, freeing their small IT team to focus on supporting their organization’s mission instead of managing racks.

Flexible, efficient scaling. Resources now scale based on actual demand, not on whatever physical hardware happened to be available. This flexibility supports their work without the overhead of over-provisioning or the risk of running out of capacity.

Practicing What They Preach

For environmental organizations, credibility is everything. When Milieudefensie advocates for corporate accountability on climate change, they need to walk the talk themselves.

“It helps us in our mission by being able to do what we say,” their team explains. When they discuss reducing carbon emissions with policymakers, corporations, or the public, they can point to their own infrastructure choices as evidence they practice what they preach.

In an industry where greenwashing is common, this matters. They’re not working with a provider that added sustainability as an afterthought—they’re working with one where environmental impact reduction is foundational.

What They’d Actually Miss

When asked what they’d miss most if Leafcloud disappeared tomorrow, the answer wasn’t about uptime percentages or performance benchmarks.

“The option to host at a company who has the environment as a core focus.”

There are dozens of cloud providers. There are very few where sustainability is genuinely core to the business model, not just marketing copy. For Milieudefensie, that distinction is worth everything.

The Best Kind of Surprise: No Surprises

When asked what surprised them most about working with Leafcloud, their response was refreshingly straightforward: “Nothing really, which is a good thing.”

In an industry notorious for surprise bills, unexpected downtime, and hidden complexity, boring reliability is actually remarkable. Things work as promised. Deployments are fast. Support is responsive. No drama.

Sometimes the best endorsement is simply: it works, and it works the way you’d hope.

Ready to align your infrastructure with your values? Whether you’re an environmental organization, a mission-driven company, or simply tired of contributing to Big Tech’s carbon footprint, Leafcloud offers a better way forward.

Get started: leaf.cloud
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