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AWS Solutions Library

Guidance for Carbon Accounting on AWS

Overview

This Guidance helps customers calculate their carbon footprints, track their Greenhouse gas (GHG) emitting activities, and identify carbon hotspots. The Guidance for Sustainability Insights Framework on AWS provides the software building blocks to help accelerate the design, implementation, or expansion of applications to automate carbon footprint tracking.

How it works

These technical details feature an architecture diagram to illustrate how to effectively use this solution. The architecture diagram shows the key components and their interactions, providing an overview of the architecture's structure and functionality step-by-step.

Download the architecture diagram

Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

Monitor your organization's operational health and notify operators of faults with Amazon CloudWatch, where you can customize metrics, alarms, and dashboards. For more on how to gain insights into your operations, see the Guidance for Sustainability Insights Framework on AWS.

Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper 

Resources deployed by this Guidance are protected by AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies and principles. CloudFront allows customers to enable TLS to secure data in transit and also makes use of AWS WAF for additional protection. User authentication is managed through Amazon Cognito, and all APIs use a Cognito authorizer. Data is protected through access controls implemented by IAM and Amazon S3 bucket policies.

The Guidance for Sustainability Insights Framework on AWS provides in-depth, best-practices for architecting secure workloads on AWS.

Read the Security whitepaper 

To help your workloads perform their intended function correctly and consistently, this Guidance uses a serverless web application that scales automatically and is automatically deployed across multiple Availability Zones. The architecture is managed through an AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK).

Implementing reliable workloads for carbon footprint tracking is detailed further in the Guidance for Sustainability Insights Framework on AWS.

Read the Reliability whitepaper 

CloudFront, a serverless application that caches content, decreases latency to the end user.
The Guidance for Sustainability Insights Framework on AWShas more on the efficient use of computing resources.

Read the Performance Efficiency whitepaper 

With the serverless web application this Guidance uses, you only pay for what you use. Caching through CloudFront reduces data transfer and access costs for Amazon S3.

For the cost implications of the Sustainability Insights Framework of this Guidance, please refer to theGuidance for Sustainability Insights Framework on AWS.

Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper 

All computing resources in this Guidance run through AWS Lambda that does not require any hardware provisioning when not in use.

Reducing your total resources is further detailed in the Guidance for Sustainability Insights Framework on AWS.

Read the Sustainability whitepaper 

Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.