Sustainability
- The question it answers
- Are we minimizing the environmental impact of running this workload? (Added as the sixth pillar in 2021.)
- Design principles
- Understand your impact and set improvement goals.
- Maximize utilization — one instance at 80% beats four at 20%.
- Adopt new, more efficient hardware and software offerings (for example, Graviton processors).
- Use managed services — AWS aggregates workloads and runs them at higher utilization than you can alone.
- Reduce the downstream impact of your cloud workloads (smaller assets, fewer device requirements).
- Practical levers
- Right-size, use Spot and serverless, tier cold data to Amazon S3 Glacier, delete unused resources, choose Regions with lower carbon intensity.
- Shared responsibility angle
- AWS is responsible for sustainability of the cloud (renewable energy, efficient data centers); you are responsible for sustainability in the cloud (efficient workloads).