Last year AWS added a new Sustainability Pillar to their Well-Architected Framework. Now with some time to reflect we are going to break down the Sustainability Pillar’s potential impact on your cloud workloads and architecture.
In case you are not familiar with it, AWS’s Well-Architected Framework consists of six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. The framework includes design principles and best practices meant to improve your cloud workloads through each specific pillar.
Specifically, the Sustainability Pillar uses a shared responsibility model for the cloud. In short, AWS is responsible for the sustainability of the cloud, and AWS users are responsible for sustainability in the cloud. In practice, this means that AWS is responsible for sustainable data centers, servers, and electrical supply. AWS has been so successful in this dimension of sustainability that AWS customers can see an 80% reduction in energy usage compared to traditional on-premises data centers.
The second part of that shared responsibility model is focused on the user. AWS customers are responsible for sustainable application design, data storage, and cloud utilization. AWS’s Well-Architected Framework successfully simplifies this process and has helped millions of organizations reduce their environmental impact through the cloud.
Brian Stephens, a Strategic Communications Cloud Solutions Architect had this to say about cloud sustainability “ The Sustainability Pillar, within the AWS Well-Architected Framework, focuses on environmental sustainability. It could be vastly beneficial for enterprises, agencies, and small businesses to adopt strategies within this framework pillar to benefit from reducing waste and maximizing efficiency.”
Some examples of best practices included in the Well-Architected Framework are:
- Optimizing AWS regions relative to user location
- Optimize impact on customer devices and equipment
- Increase utilization of pre-existing cloud environments
- Implement policies to delete unnecessary data
- Minimize data movement across networks
To learn more about the Sustainability pillar, or to receive a guided Well-Architected Review of your IT environment please use the button below to reach out to a member of Strategic’s cloud engineering team.
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