The AWS Sustainability WAF Pillar

If you attended AWS re:invent 2021, or watched from the comfort of your own home, you will probably have noticed one of the big themes of this year’s conference: Sustainability. And AWS are far from alone in recognising the ever-increasing importance of sustainability in technology and business. All major cloud providers are working on ways in which they can help their customers not only run their platforms and workloads more sustainably, but also use cloud services to improve the sustainability of their entire company.

Here at Contino we’re super excited to see AWS paying so much attention to sustainability in 2022 as this is something we’ve been looking for, for a while. Personally, the addition of the Sustainability Pillar to the Well-Architected framework was one of the best announcements at re:invent this last year. Having been through the whitepaper I can assure you there is some excellent guidance throughout, but it is a fairly lengthy document so in this post I’ll give you a summary of my top takeaways.

1. Sustainability is a Shared Responsibility — As with all things AWS, they are responsible for the sustainability of the cloud and you are responsible for sustainability in the cloud. An addition, for the sustainability pillar is the concept of ‘sustainability through the cloud’, which means using the cloud to help your organisation become more sustainable as a whole, not just in your use of the cloud.
2. Understand your starting position and ongoing impact — In order for your cloud platforms and workloads to become more sustainable you must first understand their current environmental impact. You can then extrapolate from there to measure their sustainability over time. Measuring and quantifying your sustainability is not necessarily easy but is a critical starting point.
3. Identify targets, metrics, and KPIs — Once you understand where you are starting from you can go about improving. To do this you should identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will allow you to measure your performance in improving your sustainability over the long-term. These KPIs should be centred around proxy metrics that can be easily measured, and best identify your resource usage, such as CPU minutes used and aligned to business metrics, such as Number of Sales. At which point you can set a target reduction in this measure and thereby improve your efficiency.
4. Build sustainability into your SDLC — This is just as true of sustainability as it is of security, observability, testing, and a myriad of other things. In modern application and platform development these things cannot be a ‘step’ in a process but must be incorporated into every aspect of a product or platform. You must design for sustainability, build for sustainability, test for sustainability etc etc. My advice is to take a shift-left approach to this and do it early, or it will forever be an aspiration.
5. A data strategy is critical — Data is more important to applications and platforms today than it was yesterday, and tomorrow it will be more important than it is today. It is also growing at an exponential rate. Therefore, managing data in an inefficient way can be costly not only for your wallet, but also for your environmental footprint. Storage of data should be minimised, data lifecycles and classifications should be put in place so data isn’t being retained for longer than needed, data needn’t be duplicated in several places across your account. All of these things lead to inefficiencies, and inefficiencies are, by their nature, wasteful. A well thought out data strategy can go a long way to helping you achieve your sustainability goals.
6. Sustainability and Cost Reduction go hand-in-hand — A big part of cost reduction is about eliminating waste, which obviously is also part of the case for sustainability. For example, shutting down your test environments outside of working hours will keep costs down and also use less energy. The good news here is that a lot of your cost-reduction processes and strategy, if you have them, will help to provide the foundations for your sustainability improvement. This, of course, still requires evaluation.

All-in-all I believe that the cloud, and in particular AWS, gives businesses across the spectrum the opportunity to operate more sustainably in 2022.

If you’d like to know more about making your organisation more sustainable I strongly recommend giving the whitepaper a read for yourself.

Contino can also help you to get started quickly, and scale, on your sustainability journey with our sustainability design sprint, please get in touch if you’d like to find out more.