AWS have a Sustainability Pillar as part of their Well Architected Framework. This means that we have proven guidance, advice and questions to leverage on our path to delivering Well Architected Sustainable solutions for your AWS well architected framework questions.
Sustainability Questions
I did a review of the Sustainability Pillar white paper. And I pulled together a list of “How do you?” sustainability questions. You can start applying these to your workloads as part of your Well Architected Review process.
Region selection for sustainability
The next question is: how do you choose a Region to implement your workloads. And is based on both your business requirements and sustainability goals?
Sustainable user behavior patterns
- How do you scale infrastructure with user load?
- How do you align SLAs with sustainability goals?
- How do you eliminate creation and maintenance of unused assets?
- How do you optimize geographic placement of workloads for user locations?
- How do you optimize team member resources for activities performed?
Software and architecture patterns for sustainability
- How do you optimize software and architecture for asynchronous and scheduled jobs?
- How do you remove or refactor workload components with low or no use?
- How do you optimize areas of code that consume the most time or resources?
- How do you optimize impact on customer devices and equipment?
- How do you use software patterns and architectures that best support data access and storage patterns?
Data patterns
- How do you implement your data classification policy ?
- How do you use technologies that support data access and storage patterns?
- How do you use lifecycle policies to delete unnecessary data?
- How do you minimize over-provisioning in block storage?
- How do you remove unneeded or redundant data?
- How do you use shared file systems or object storage to access common data?
- How do you minimize data movement across networks?
- How do you backup data only when difficult to recreate?
Hardware patterns
- How do you use the minimum amount of hardware to meet your needs?
- How do you use instance types with the least impact?
- How do you use managed services?
- How do you optimize your use of GPUs?
Sustainable Development and deployment process
- How do you adopt methods that can rapidly introduce sustainability improvements?
- How do you keep your workload up to date?
- How do you increase utilization of build environments?
- How do you use managed device farms for testing?
Well Architected MindGraph
I have leveraged mind maps throughout my career. Simon Wardley points out that they are not real maps. So I now call them mindgraphs :-).
I have used Well Architected mindgraph heavily in my own work over the past few years to ask better questions and with the addition of the sustainability questions that will continue.
The xmind format of the Mindgraph is available here, PNG version here
10 thoughts on “Questions you need to ask for Well Architected Sustainability”