We're continuing our conversation on the well architected pillars looking at what is our favourite pillar. Today we're talking about sustainability. There's a list of best practices that are broken down into sections:
Region Selection,
User Behaviour Patterns,
Software and Architecture Patterns,
Data Patterns,
Hardware Patterns, and
Development and Deployment Process.
Region Selection is quite straightforward. Some regions are supplied with greener energy than others. Some regions are using non sustainable resources, depending on where you are in the world. If you don't have massive latency requirements, or a real need for super fast, low latency, then you're probably best putting it into a more sustainable region. So where you put your workloads can have a sustainability impact.
User Behaviour Patterns is about using assets in an elastic way with the latest technology. It will be more sustainable, efficient and cheaper on modern cloud. If you go down the legacy cloud route, and treat the public cloud like a data centre, then you're not going to be very sustainable, you're not going to be very cheap, and you're not going to be very efficient.
Software Architecture Patterns is about keeping your code base and your architecture really efficient such as refactoring optimization and more effective data access. It's good practice as it ties back into efficient design. When you work in enterprise spaces, you do question the value of older business products that are running in the background. You've got to constantly assess if this is worth the compute?
Data Patterns: there's an awful lot of waste with data flying around the internet. There's a lot of good practice here. Data can be quite toxic for various reasons from privacy breaches and security points of view. You should have a good handle on this. Your data classification is critical. If you don't extract value from it, get rid of it or it's going to be unsustainable. Everything's becoming more data centric, and the amount of compute that goes into chomping data is 90% of what IT. I'd love to see how much electricity or energy is used on processing data. I am keen to see how organisations approach this one.
Hardware Patterns: is right sizing our stuff correctly. We've all been in teams where the question asked is: 'what size box do you need?' And the answer back is: 'the biggest one humanly possible!'. It's a natural reaction but you don't need that. This is where a serverless first mindset and approach really kicks up a gear. You don't even have to concern yourself with a lot of these questions. It automatically scales up and down appropriately. We don't have to worry about picking hardware or incident sizes ahead of time.
Development and Deployment Process: how do you increase utilisation of build environments? We see this quite a lot where environments sprawl and asset's sprawl for no real benefit. So again, it's all about being smart about how you set up your clients, how you set up your pipelines and how you set up your environments to make sure they're actually delivering value. And they're not just there because that's the way we have always done it. The question here is: 'how do you adopt methods that can rapidly reduce or introduce sustainability improvements?'. If you're on a serverless spectrum, the cloud providers are working for you and they're introducing new capabilities.
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Serverless Craic Ep13 AWS Well Architected Sustainability Pillar