26 ‘How do you?’ Sustainability Questions

AWS has a Sustainability Pillar as part of its Well-Architected Framework, which is 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

We read the ‘Sustainability Pillar white paper‘ and we pulled together a list of “How do you?” sustainability questions. You can apply these to your workloads as part of your Well-Architected Review process.

Region selection for sustainability

How do you choose a Region to fulfill your business requirements and sustainability goals?

Sustainable user behavior patterns

How do you:

• Scale infrastructure with user load?
• Align SLAs with sustainability goals?
• Eliminate the creation and maintenance of unused assets.
• Optimize the geographic placement of workloads for user locations.
• 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.
• Remove or refactor workload components with low or no use?
• Optimize areas of code that consume the most time or resources.
• Optimize impact on customer devices and equipment?
• Use software patterns and architectures that best support data access and storage patterns.

Data patterns

How do you:

• Implement your data classification policy.
• Use technologies that support data access and storage patterns.
• Use lifecycle policies to delete unnecessary data.
• Minimize over-provisioning in block storage.
• Remove unneeded or redundant data?
• Use shared file systems or object storage to access common data.
• Minimize data movement across networks?
• Back up data when challenging to recreate?

Hardware patterns

How do you:

• Use the minimum amount of hardware to meet your needs.
• Use instance types with the most negligible impact.
• Use managed services?
• Optimize your use of GPUs.

Sustainable Development and deployment process

How do you:

• Adopt methods that can rapidly introduce sustainability improvements.
• Keep your workload up to date.
• Increase the utilization of built environments?
• Use managed device farms for testing.

Well-Architected MindGraph

We have leveraged mind maps throughout our careers. Simon Wardley points out that they are not actual maps. I call them mind-graphs!

We have used the Well-Architected mind graph heavily in our work over the past few years to ask better questions, which will continue with the addition of sustainability questions.

The xmind format of the Mindgraph is available here, PNG version here