Prioritizing sustainable cloud architectures: a how-to round up

With Earth Month upon us and in celebration of Earth Day tomorrow, 4/22, sustainability is top-of-mind for individuals and organizations around the world. But it doesn’t take a certain time of year to act toward the urgent need to innovate and adopt smarter, more efficient solutions!

Sustainable cloud architectures are fundamental to sustainable workloads, and we’re spotlighting content that helps build solutions to meet and advance sustainability goals. Here’s our recent post round up to make sustainable architectures meaningful and actionable for customers of all kinds:

This post spotlights the AWS re:Invent 2022 sustainability track and key conversations around sustainability of, in, and through the cloud. It covers key uses cases and breakout sessions, including AWS customers demonstrating best practices from the AWS Well-Architected Framework Sustainability Pillar. Hear about these and more:

• The Amazon Prime Video experience using the AWS sustainability improvement process for Thursday Night Football streaming
• Pinterest’s sustainability journey with AWS from Pinterest Chief Architect David Chaiken

The most recent sustainability focused Let’s Architect! series post shares practical tips for making cloud applications more sustainable. It also covers the AWS customer carbon footprint tool to help organizations monitor, analyze, and reduce their AWS footprint, and details how Amazon Prime Video used these tools to establish baselines and drive significant efficiencies across their AWS usage.

This two-part blog series explores more specific topics relating to the Sustainability Pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework as connected to the Modern Data Architecture on AWS. What’s covered includes:

1. Integrating a data lake and purpose-built data services to efficiently build analytics workloads to provide speed and agility at scale in Part 1 – Data Ingestion and Data Lake
2. Guidance and best practices to optimize the components within the unified data governance, data movement, and purpose-built analytics pillars in Part 2 – Unified Data Governance, Data Movement, and Purpose-built Analytics

Did you know workload Region selection significantly affects KPIs including performance, cost, and carbon footprint? For example, when an AWS Region is chosen based on the market-based method, emissions are calculated using the electricity that business purchases. Contracting and purchasing electricity produced by renewable energy sources like solar and wind are more sustainable. Region selection is is another part of the Well-Architected Framework Sustainability Pillar, and this blog post covers key considerations for choosing AWS Regions per workload.

Check back soon for more earth-friendly advice from our experts!