SUSTAINABILITY: The Sixth Pillar Of AWS Well-Architected Framework

1. Introduction:

Authorized AWS partners do Well-Architected Review (WAR) by using AWS’s well-architected tool to ensure that the infrastructure and system built on AWS are well-architected. If there are any issues, we, the consulting partner, recommend the best practices to implement and fix the problems through remediations based on security, operational excellence, performance efficiency, reliability, and cost optimization.

Read about AWS Well-Architected Review: A WAR Case Study here.

Sustainability is the sixth pillar of AWS Well-Architected Framework. This pillar helps in learning designing principles, best practices, operational guidelines, and improvement to meet the required sustainability targets for your workloads.

2. Why Well-Architected Framework?

Well-Architected Framework helps in constantly learning to build an operationally excellent, secure, reliable, cost-effective, efficient, and sustainable architecture. By continuously reviewing the best architectural frameworks, we can improve the required areas.

3. Sustainability as a Pillar!

As the world is moving forward to reduce the carbon print with efficient usage of resources, AWS introduced Sustainability as a new pillar to reduce the environmental impact by providing the best practices to use energy-efficient resources from the AWS end and effective usage of resources from the customer end.

4. How to achieve Sustainability?

There are six design principles to achieve Sustainability,

• # Analyze your impact:
  Measure the total impact of your cloud workload and project your future impact, including all the potential sources of influence. Use this information to increase productivity while minimizing environmental impact and forecast the impact of suggested changes over time.
• # Formulate your targets:
  Enact long-term targets for each cloud task, like lowering the amount of compute, storage, and networking resources needed per transition. Evaluate the financial return on Sustainability and plan for reducing the effective intensity with growth per unit.
• # Effective resource utilisation:
  To ensure maximum resource utilization and increase the energy efficiency of the physical infrastructure, suitable workloads and adopt the efficient design.
• # Integrate new and efficient technologies:
  Design a flexible workload for speedy adoption of new efficient hardware and software options regularly to your workload.
• # Use Managed services:
  By using the AWS managed services, customers can share the resources. You can get the most out of the resources and reduce the infrastructure required for your workload. You can use lambda and fargate services to scale workloads, amazon s3 lifecycle configurations, and auto-scaling groups to reduce your efforts.
• # Limit the cloud application’s downstream effect:
  Use resources effectively to improve time and energy efficiency.

5. Best Practises to achieve Sustainability:

Sustainability requires continuous efforts to maintain the efficiency of resources, effective usage of resources can be achieved by getting maximum service out of resources and using a minimum number of resources for your workload.

• # Align your resource levels to meet the user requirements with minimal resources. Use scaling options to remove excess resources and improve efficiency. Reduce the unused resources and stop maintaining them. Make service level arguments minimal to reduce the data retention period. For example, select the least distant region to reduce the distance the network traffic must travel.
• # Revise your design patterns and analyze the unused and under-utilized resources. Use the AWS Serverless offerings to use resources only when they are required. Make the customer hardware requirements minimum and perform the complex operations at the backend to increase the expected lifecycle of the devices.
• # Analyze your data and storage requirements, and plan for effective storage devices. Classify the data according to the frequency of accessing it and use lifecycle configurations to manage your data and timely delete unnecessary data. Reduce data redundancy and backup only the needed data.
• # Try to reduce your hardware requirements by using the most efficient resources. Choose the cloud services for meeting flexible hardware changes for your workloads. Consider the new instance types to make your hardware more energy-efficient. Use the managed services for optimal resource utilization.
• # Test and validate your workload improvements before deploying them. Manage the patching to use new O.S and libraries to be more efficient. Take maximum usage of automation, infrastructure as code, spot instances, and elastic container services to improve efficiency. Use device farm service to test your application with different devices and reduce customer hardware requirement needs.

6. Conclusion:

The sustainability pillar is the new addition to the existing five pillars of the well-architected Framework. With its massive infrastructure, AWS improves the efficiency of energy utilization, infrastructure cooling, and networking; it is constantly moving towards sustainable services. Sustainability also goes in hand with cost-optimization, improving resource efficiency and minimal resource utilization, reducing the environmental impact. By following Sustainability, we need to trade off another factor, but we should try to balance all the six pillars according to our requirements.

7. About CloudThat:

CloudThat is the authorized AWS Well-Architected Partner, helping other businesses build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructures for their application and workloads.

CloudThat is also the official AWS (Amazon Web Services) Advanced Consulting Partner and Training partner and Microsoft gold partner, helping people develop knowledge of the cloud and help their businesses aim for higher goals using best in industry cloud computing practices and expertise. We are on a mission to build a robust cloud computing ecosystem by disseminating knowledge on technological intricacies within the cloud space. Our blogs, webinars, case studies, and white papers enable all the stakeholders in the cloud computing sphere.

Drop a query if you have any questions regarding Well-Architected Review, AWS WAR Partnership, or consulting opportunity, and I will get back to you quickly. To get started, go through our Expert Advisory page and Managed Services Package that is CloudThat’s offerings.

8. FAQs

1. How is AWS moving towards achieving Sustainability in the cloud?
   Amazon is working to build an efficient global infrastructure and giving continuous efforts for better innovations to have a 100% renewable infrastructure by 2025.
2. How can you make your infrastructure compute-optimized for Sustainability?
   Make way for serverless AWS services to maximize your efficiency. For example, consider cleaning up unused resources and enable monitoring.

WRITTEN BY Dharshan Kumar K S

Dharshan Kumar is a Research Associate at CloudThat. He has a working knowledge of various cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft, ad GCP. He is interested to learn more about AWS's Well-Architected Framework and writes about them.