Sustainability

The sustainability pillar includes the ability to deliver business value while minimizing resource usage, environmental impacts, and energy consumption. This section provides you with an overview of sustainability design principles, best practices, and questions. You can find implementation guidance in the Sustainability Pillar whitepaper.

Definitions

This whitepaper covers sustainability in the cloud, describing best practices in the following areas:

• Region selection

• Alignment to demand

• Software and architecture patterns

• Data management

• Hardware and services

Design principles

The Well-Architected Framework identifies a set of general design principles to facilitate sustainability while deploying hybrid services and workloads:

• Consider workload placement: It is always a best practice to use AWS Regions when building workloads, as Regions offer tools for managing service and instance elasticity. If a workload has latency or data residency requirements that cannot be addressed in a Region, consider using an AWS Local Zone where workload elasticity is still easily achieved with Amazon EC2. If a Local Zone cannot meet workload requirements, consider using AWS Outposts, where capacity must be more precisely matched with requirements.

• Characterize workload requirements: Before using AWS hybrid services, fully assess and understand your workload resource requirements. Always engage an AWS migration specialist, and use the AWS Migration Evaluator to capture workload resource utilization to make a data-driven decision on which hybrid services to use and how much capacity to deploy.

• Match EC2 instance size to measured load: Use tools such as Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Compute Optimizer to track EC2 instance resource utilization and right-size instances based on data-driven recommendations.