SUS02-BP02 Align SLAs with sustainability goals - AWS Well-Architected Framework (2023-04-10)

SUS02-BP02 Align SLAs with sustainability goals

Review and optimize workload service-level agreements (SLA) based on your sustainability goals to minimize the resources required to support your workload while continuing to meet business needs.

Common anti-patterns:

  • Workload SLAs are unknown or ambiguous.

  • You define your SLA just for availability and performance.

  • You use the same design pattern (like Multi-AZ architecture) for all your workloads.

Benefits of establishing this best practice: Aligning SLAs with sustainability goals leads to optimal resource usage while meeting business needs.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Low

Implementation guidance

SLAs define the level of service expected from a cloud workload, such as response time, availability, and data retention. They influence the architecture, resource usage, and environmental impact of a cloud workload. At a regular cadence, review SLAs and make trade-offs that significantly reduce resource usage in exchange for acceptable decreases in service levels.

Implementation steps

  • Define or redesign SLAs that support your sustainability goals while meeting your business requirements, not exceeding them.

  • Make trade-offs that significantly reduce sustainability impacts in exchange for acceptable decreases in service levels.

    • Sustainability and reliability: Highly available workloads tend to consume more resources.

    • Sustainability and performance: Using more resources to boost performance could have a higher environmental impact.

    • Sustainability and security: Overly secure workloads could have a higher environmental impact.

  • Use design patterns such as microservices on AWS that prioritize business-critical functions and allow lower service levels (such as response time or recovery time objectives) for non-critical functions.

Resources

Related documents:

Related videos: