Sustainability Pillar

The sustainability pillar focuses on minimizing the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads. Key topics include a shared responsibility model for sustainability, understanding impact, and maximizing utilization to minimize required resources and reduce downstream impacts.

The Sustainability pillar includes the ability to support development and run workloads effectively, gain insight into their operations, and to continuously improve supporting processes and procedures to deliver business value.

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

The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides a set of questions that allows you to review an existing or proposed architecture. It also provides a set of AWS best practices for each pillar.

SUS01 - How do you select Regions to support your sustainability goals?

View details →

SUS02 - How do you take advantage of user behavior patterns to support your sustainability goals?

View details →

SUS03 - How do you take advantage of software and architecture patterns to support your sustainability goals?

View details →

SUS04 - How do you take advantage of data access and usage patterns to support your sustainability goals?

View details →

SUS05 - How do you take advantage of hardware patterns to support your sustainability goals?

View details →

SUS06 - How do you take advantage of development and deployment process to support your sustainability goals?

View details →

AWS Services for Sustainability

AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool

Provides visibility into the carbon emissions associated with your AWS usage.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Helps ensure you have the correct number of instances available to handle your application load.

Amazon S3 Lifecycle Configurations

Automates moving objects to more cost-effective storage classes or deleting them.

AWS Graviton Processors

Deliver better price performance for your cloud workloads with lower energy consumption.

AWS Compute Optimizer

Helps you identify idle and underutilized resources.


Table of contents