Description The ability to continually improve sustainability impacts by reducing energy consumption and increasing efficiency across all components of a workload by maximizing the benefits from the provisioned resources and minimizing the total resources required.
What, When & Why – 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.
Environmental sustainability is a shared responsibility between customers and AWS.
AWS is responsible for optimizing the sustainability of the cloud – delivering efficient, shared infrastructure, water stewardship, and sourcing renewable power.
Customers are responsible for sustainability in the cloud – optimizing workloads and resource utilization, and minimizing the total resources required to be deployed for your workloads.
Design principles for sustainability in the cloud
- Understand your impact
- Establish sustainability goals
- Maximize utilization
- Anticipate and adopt new, more efficient hardware and software offerings
- Use managed services
- Reduce the downstream impact of your cloud workloads
The goals of your improvements can be:
- To eliminate waste, low utilization, and idle or unused resources
- To maximize the value from the resources you consume
Takeaways
An increasing number of organizations are setting sustainability targets in response to changes in government regulation, competitive advantage, and customer, employee, and investor demand.
Every action you take to reduce resource usage and increase efficiency across your workloads contributes to a reduction in environmental impact and contributes to your organizations’ broader sustainability goals.