Sustainability

The Sustainability pillar addresses the long-term environmental, economic, and societal impact of your business activities, and focuses on reducing the energy consumption and footprint of cloud workloads.

Key Areas

The Sustainability pillar includes the following key areas:

Region Selection - Choosing Regions with lower carbon footprints
User Behavior Patterns - Aligning user needs with sustainable practices
Software and Architecture Patterns - Designing efficient applications
Data Patterns - Implementing lifecycle policies and storage tiering
Hardware Patterns - Using the minimum amount of hardware to meet your needs
Development and Deployment Process - Optimizing development and testing environments

Questions

SUS01 1 best practices

How do you select Regions to support your sustainability goals?

BP01 Choose Region based on both business requirements and sustainability goals

SUS02 6 best practices

How do you take advantage of user behavior patterns to support your sustainability goals?

BP01 Scale workload infrastructure dynamically BP02 Align SLAs with sustainability goals BP03 Stop the creation and maintenance of unused assets BP04 Optimize geographic placement of workloads based on their networking requirements BP05 Optimize team member resources for activities performed BP06 Implement buffering or throttling to flatten the demand curve

SUS03 5 best practices

How do you take advantage of software and architecture patterns to support your sustainability goals?

BP01 Optimize software and architecture for asynchronous and scheduled jobs BP02 Remove or refactor workload components with low or no use BP03 Optimize areas of code that consume the most time or resources BP04 Optimize impact on devices and equipment BP05 Use software patterns and architectures that best support data access and storage patterns

SUS04 8 best practices

How do you take advantage of data access and usage patterns to support your sustainability goals?

BP01 Implement a data classification policy BP02 Use technologies that support data access and storage patterns BP03 Use policies to manage the lifecycle of your datasets BP04 Use elasticity and automation to expand block storage or file system BP05 Remove unneeded or redundant data BP06 Use shared file systems or storage to access common data BP07 Minimize data movement across networks BP08 Back up data only when difficult to recreate

SUS05 4 best practices

How do you select and use cloud hardware and services in your architecture to support your sustainability goals?

BP01 Use the minimum amount of hardware to meet your needs BP02 Use instance types with the least impact BP03 Use managed services BP04 Optimize your use of hardware-based compute accelerators

SUS06 5 best practices

How do you take advantage of development and deployment process to support your sustainability goals?

BP01 Communicate and cascade your sustainability goals BP02 Adopt methods that can rapidly introduce sustainability improvements BP03 Keep your workload up-to-date BP04 Increase utilization of build environments BP05 Use managed device farms for testing

AWS services for Sustainability

AWS Graviton

Processors designed to deliver the best price performance with lower energy use.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Match compute supply to demand so idle resources are not left running.

Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering

Automatically moves data to the most cost- and energy-efficient access tier.

AWS Lambda

Serverless compute that runs only when needed, improving utilization.

AWS Instance Scheduler

Automates start/stop schedules for EC2 and RDS to cut idle time.

Customer Carbon Footprint Tool

Track, measure, and forecast the carbon emissions of your AWS usage.

Related resources