Sustainability
Organizations and government departments play a critical role in conserving natural resources and protecting global ecosystems by reducing the use of materials, resources, and emissions.
The practice of designing and building sustainable cloud workloads requires understanding what environmental impact is attributable to your IT usage. You can then apply the best practices and suggestions in this section to reduce that impact.
Sustainability in the cloud is a continuous effort focused primarily on energy reduction and efficiency across all components of a workload. You can do this by achieving the maximum benefit from the resources provisioned and minimizing the total resources required. This effort can range from the initial selection of an efficient programming language, adoption of modern algorithms, use of efficient data storage techniques, deploying to correctly sized and efficient compute infrastructure, and minimizing requirements for high-powered end user hardware. Many of the best practices in the performance efficiency and cost optimization pillars also apply to building sustainable cloud workloads.
How do you ensure the services and the infrastructure deployed to ingest, process, and analyze data have been designed with sustainability as an architectural principle? This section details how to design your data platforms using architectural best practices to reduce the environmental impact of your organization’s data analytics workloads.
Throughout this section, we explore various best practices to help understand how they can reduce the environmental impact of your analytics workloads. Implementing each of the best practices involves resource trade-offs. Your organization should examine these best practices, both holistically and individually, and agree on whether they are beneficial in meeting your sustainability goals. Data compression, for instance, minimizes your storage footprint. But, as a trade-off, more computing power is required to decompress the data. It is advised that your company tests the best practice recommendations to determine the level of storage compared to compute trade-offs and identify which approach is most sustainably beneficial.
Best practice
