Sustainability Pillar
The ability to continually improve the environmental sustainability impacts of your cloud workloads by minimizing resource consumption and maximizing utilization.
Official Questions
Best Practices
High Risk if Missing
AWS Verbatim
Renewable energy Region selection, serverless scale-to-zero, storage pruning via TTL, and Graviton3 ARM64 processor efficiency.
In AWS Well-Architected, questions do not have single-choice trick answers. Every listed Best Practice represents an official architectural answer you must incorporate into your workload. When asked these questions in an Amazon System Design interview, your score is evaluated by how many of these best practices you proactively articulate and defend with trade-offs.
Verbatim Questions & Architecture Answers
How do you select Regions for your workload?
Choose AWS Regions powered by renewable energy grids to minimize carbon footprint.
Recommended Answers (Official AWS Best Practices Checklist)
Every best practice below is an official answer to incorporate into your system design:
Select Regions like eu-west-1 (Ireland) or us-west-2 (Oregon) powered by renewable electricity.
Balanced against user latency and data residency requirements.
Renewable regions often have competitive cloud compute pricing.
Meets corporate sustainability and ESG compliance mandates.
How do you align cloud resources to your demand?
Use serverless architectures that scale to zero when idle to avoid burning energy.
Recommended Answers (Official AWS Best Practices Checklist)
Every best practice below is an official answer to incorporate into your system design:
Shut down unused compute when demand is zero rather than running idle servers.
Slight cold start trade-off for idle services, eliminated by provisioned concurrency on hot paths.
Direct correlation: zero energy burned = zero cloud dollars paid.
Eliminates managing idle capacity.
How do you take advantage of software and architecture patterns to support your sustainability goals?
Batch asynchronous work and optimize algorithmic efficiency to reduce CPU cycles.
Recommended Answers (Official AWS Best Practices Checklist)
Every best practice below is an official answer to incorporate into your system design:
Buffer and process non-time-critical batch jobs when electrical grid carbon intensity is lowest.
Asynchronous batching maximizes compute saturation and CPU instruction efficiency.
Enables taking advantage of off-peak compute and Spot pricing.
Decouples ingestion from processing.
How do you take advantage of data management policies and patterns to support your sustainability goals?
Prune stale data automatically using TTL and compress storage.
Recommended Answers (Official AWS Best Practices Checklist)
Every best practice below is an official answer to incorporate into your system design:
Use DynamoDB TTL and S3 lifecycle rules to delete unneeded records and logs.
Compact storage indexes yield faster query response times.
Prevents paying to store petabytes of obsolete logs.
Automated deletion requires zero operational human intervention.
How do you select and use cloud hardware and services in your architecture to support your sustainability goals?
Adopt AWS Graviton3 (ARM64) processors for up to 60% lower energy consumption.
Recommended Answers (Official AWS Best Practices Checklist)
Every best practice below is an official answer to incorporate into your system design:
Migrate x86 compute to Graviton3, which delivers up to 60% better energy efficiency.
Graviton3 provides higher sustained compute throughput per core.
Delivers 20% lower cost compared to comparable x86 instances.
Requires compiling containers for linux/arm64.
How do your organizational processes support your sustainability goals?
Track workload carbon footprint using the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool.
Recommended Answers (Official AWS Best Practices Checklist)
Every best practice below is an official answer to incorporate into your system design:
Monitor estimated carbon emissions alongside cloud financial metrics.
Creates continuous visibility into infrastructure efficiency.
Directly aligns engineering frugality with environmental stewardship.
Provides executive reporting data automatically.