Sustainability Pillar - AWS Well-Architected Framework

Publication date: November 6, 2024 (Document revisions)

This whitepaper focuses on the sustainability pillar of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Well-Architected Framework. It provides design principles, operational guidance, best-practices, potential trade-offs, and improvement plans you can use to meet sustainability targets for your AWS workloads.

Introduction

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand the pros and cons of decisions you make while building workloads on AWS. Using the Framework helps you learn architectural best practices for designing and operating secure, reliable, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable workloads in the AWS Cloud. The Framework provides a way for you to consistently measure your architectures against best practices and identify areas for improvement. Having well-architected workloads greatly increases your ability to support your business outcomes.

The Framework is based on six pillars:

This document focuses on the sustainability pillar, and within the scope of sustainability, it focuses on environmental sustainability. It’s intended for those in technology roles, such as chief technology officers (CTOs), architects, developers, and operations team members.

After reading this document, you will understand current AWS recommendations and strategies to use when designing cloud architectures with sustainability in mind. By adopting the practices in this paper, you can build architectures that maximize efficiency and reduce waste.