Data management
The following question focuses on these considerations for sustainability:
| SUS 4: How do you take advantage of data management policies and patterns to support your sustainability goals? |
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Implement data management practices to reduce the provisioned storage required to support your workload, and the resources required to use it. Understand your data, and use storage technologies and configurations that most effectively supports the business value of the data and how it’s used. Lifecycle data to more efficient, less performant storage when requirements decrease, and delete data that’s no longer required. |
Implement a data classification policy: Classify data to understand its significance to business outcomes. Use this information to determine when you can move data to more energy-efficient storage or safely delete it.
Use technologies that support data access and storage patterns: Use storage that most effectively supports how your data is accessed and stored to minimize the resources provisioned while supporting your workload. For example, solid state devices (SSDs) are more energy intensive than magnetic drives and should be used only for active data use cases. Use energy-efficient, archival-class storage for infrequently accessed data.
Use lifecycle policies to delete unnecessary data: Manage the lifecycle of all your data and automatically enforce deletion timelines to minimize the total storage requirements of your workload.
Minimize over-provisioning in block storage: To minimize total provisioned storage, create block storage with size allocations that are appropriate for the workload. Use elastic volumes to expand storage as data grows without having to resize storage attached to compute resources. Regularly review elastic volumes and shrink over-provisioned volumes to fit the current data size.
Remove unneeded or redundant data: Duplicate data only when necessary to minimize total storage consumed. Use backup technologies that deduplicate data at the file and block level. Limit the use of Redundant Array of Independent Drives (RAID) configurations except where required to meet SLAs.
Use shared file systems or object storage to access common data: Adopt shared storage and single sources of truth to avoid data duplication and reduce the total storage requirements of your workload. Fetch data from shared storage only as needed. Detach unused volumes to release resources. Minimize data movement across networks: Use shared storage and access data from Regional data stores to minimize the total networking resources required to support data movement for your workload.
Back up data only when difficult to recreate: To minimize storage consumption, only back up data that has business value or is required to satisfy compliance requirements. Examine backup policies and exclude ephemeral storage that doesn’t provide value in a recovery scenario.
