SUS05 - How do you select and use cloud hardware and services in your architecture to support your sustainability goals?
Best Practices
Best Practices
This question includes the following best practices:
Key Concepts
Sustainability Design Foundations
Hardware efficiency choices: Use this concept to guide architecture and operating decisions for this question area. Define measurable targets, assign clear ownership, and review results regularly against expected business outcomes.
Managed service leverage: Use this concept to guide architecture and operating decisions for this question area. Define measurable targets, assign clear ownership, and review results regularly against expected business outcomes.
Utilization optimization: Use this concept to guide architecture and operating decisions for this question area. Define measurable targets, assign clear ownership, and review results regularly against expected business outcomes.
Operational Sustainability Controls
Rightsizing discipline: Use this concept to guide architecture and operating decisions for this question area. Define measurable targets, assign clear ownership, and review results regularly against expected business outcomes.
Elastic consumption: Use this concept to guide architecture and operating decisions for this question area. Define measurable targets, assign clear ownership, and review results regularly against expected business outcomes.
Lifecycle modernization: Use this concept to guide architecture and operating decisions for this question area. Define measurable targets, assign clear ownership, and review results regularly against expected business outcomes.
Implementation Approach
1. Select efficient service foundations
- Prefer managed services over self-managed equivalents when feasible
- Evaluate modern instance families for better efficiency
- Match compute and storage characteristics to workload profiles
- Avoid over-provisioned baseline capacity
2. Implement right-sized deployment
- Use autoscaling policies aligned to demand signals
- Set resource limits and requests appropriately
- Tune storage and network provisioning by observed utilization
- Use serverless for variable and intermittent workloads
3. Operate for sustained efficiency
- Continuously review utilization and idle resources
- Shut down or hibernate non-production environments when idle
- Automate recommendations and optimization workflows
- Track efficiency KPIs in operational dashboards
4. Modernize continuously
- Plan migration away from inefficient legacy patterns
- Adopt new hardware generations after validation
- Refresh service selections during architecture reviews
- Measure and communicate sustainability gains
AWS Services to Consider
AWS Compute Optimizer
Analyzes usage telemetry and recommends resource sizing adjustments to improve performance and efficiency.
Amazon EC2
Offers flexible instance families so you can match CPU, memory, storage, and network characteristics to workload needs.
AWS Graviton
Provides Arm-based compute options with strong price-performance for many application profiles.
AWS Lambda
Runs event-driven code without managing servers, ideal for automation and on-demand operational workflows.
Amazon ECS
Runs containerized workloads with managed scheduling and scaling for efficient compute utilization.
Amazon CloudWatch
Collects metrics, logs, alarms, and dashboards so teams can detect issues early and track operational outcomes.
Common Challenges and Solutions
Challenge: Legacy hardware choices persist too long
Solution: Schedule periodic refresh assessments and benchmark newer options before renewal cycles.
Challenge: Idle environments consume unnecessary resources
Solution: Automate start/stop schedules and decommission stale resources aggressively.
Challenge: Overfocus on cost without efficiency metrics
Solution: Track utilization and workload intensity alongside spend to guide decisions.