AWS Architecture Blog

Let’s Architect! Architecting for Sustainability

We often read news about sustainability and how governments and large corporations are working to build a better world for the future. But, have you ever asked yourself what you can do? As a software architect, how can you make a difference by addressing sustainability challenges?

In this first post of Let’s Architect!, a series of posts that gathers content to help software architects and tech leaders explore new ideas, case studies, and technical approaches, we provide materials to help you design sustainable architectures and create awareness on sustainability.

Optimizing your AWS Infrastructure for Sustainability

How do you optimize the compute layer of your environment from a sustainability perspective? An idle server still consumes power, and regulating its power consumption is one way to improve environmental impact. But, the cloud offers many other metrics and features to monitor and optimize your system.

This blog post shows you how to analyze the utilization of your compute resources, explains the main features to automatically scale based on demand, and highlights how serverless can optimize your resource utilization. Knowing how to use your resources efficiently will help reduce the amount of energy spent by your workload.

The shared responsibility model for sustainability shows how it is a shared responsibility between AWS and customers

The shared responsibility model for sustainability shows how it is a shared responsibility between AWS and customers

Building Sustainably on AWS

This talk provides several best practices you can follow as to design more sustainable architectures. It gives different tips to integrate sustainable practices throughout business operations and provides some guardrails that could help you achieve your organization’s sustainability goals more quickly.

Luke Hargreaves explaining how to build sustainably on AWS

Luke Hargreaves explaining how to build sustainably on AWS

Moving to event-driven architectures

An efficient architecture is typically a more sustainable architecture. This video explains how Amazon.com approaches event-driven architectures.

Event-driven architectures use events to communicate across different microservices. This architectural pattern works to reduce bandwidth consumption and CPU utilization and potentially lower cost. By choosing a serverless event-driven architecture, you’ll optimize your overall resource utilization because the code is run in response to events.

Tim Bray presenting how to move to an event-driven architecture at re:Invent 2019

Tim Bray presenting how to move to an event-driven architecture at re:Invent 2019

Supporting climate model simulations to accelerate climate science

This blog post discusses how collaborating research teams use the data generated through climate model simulations to study impacts on Earth and human systems—including agriculture, drought, flooding, and human health—in various parts of the world.

These studies will advance understanding of near-term climate and climate-intervention responses, and accelerate progress on a time-sensitive problem for humanity.

This architecture built on AWS Parallel Cluster supports weather and climate modeling workloads

This architecture built on AWS ParallelCluster supports weather and climate modeling workloads

See you next time!

Thanks for reading! If you want to deep dive into the topic of sustainability even more, don’t miss the Architecture Monthly edition on Sustainability.

See you in a couple of weeks when we discuss novel ways to use machine learning and artificial intelligence!

Looking for more architecture content? AWS Architecture Center provides reference architecture diagrams, vetted architecture solutions, Well-Architected best practices, patterns, icons, and more!

Other posts in this series

Luca Mezzalira

Luca Mezzalira

Luca is Principal Solutions Architect based in London. He has authored several books and is an international speaker. He lent his expertise predominantly in the solution architecture field. Luca has gained accolades for revolutionizing the scalability of front-end architectures with micro-frontends, from increasing the efficiency of workflows, to delivering quality in products.

Laura Hyatt

Laura Hyatt

Laura Hyatt is a Solutions Architect for AWS Public Sector and helps Education customers in the UK. Laura helps customers not only architect and develop scalable solutions but also think big on innovative solutions facing the education sector at present. Laura's specialty is IoT, and she is also the Alexa SME for Education across EMEA.

Vittorio Denti

Vittorio Denti

Vittorio Denti is a Machine Learning Engineer at Amazon based in London. After completing his M.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering at Politecnico di Milano (Milan) and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm), he joined AWS. Vittorio has a background in distributed systems and machine learning. He's especially passionate about software engineering and the latest innovations in machine learning science.

Zamira Jaupaj

Zamira Jaupaj

Zamira is an Enterprise Solutions Architect based in the Netherlands. She is highly passionate IT professional with over 10 years of multi-national experience in designing and implementing critical and complex solutions with containers, serverless, and data analytics for small and enterprise companies.