Sustainability Strategy Document Example

Purpose

This document serves as a guiding example for integrating sustainable software and architecture practices into your workload. By focusing on efficient data access and storage, you can align technical decisions with environmental objectives.

Key Considerations

• Data Lifecycle Management: Classify data based on usage patterns and set policies for automatically moving or deleting data that is no longer needed. This minimizes unnecessary storage and compute costs.
• Efficient Storage Formats: Use compression and optimized file formats to reduce data size. Smaller footprints lead to reduced storage requirements and network transfer impacts.
• Serverless Architectures: Implement serverless services to run code without provisioning or managing servers. This helps you consume resources on demand and scale down when usage is low.
• Right-Sized Instances: Choose compute and storage instances that match workload requirements. Overprovisioning leads to wasted resources, which increases carbon emissions.
• Event-Driven Patterns: Process data only when necessary using event-driven architecture. This reduces the need for always-on resources and can significantly decrease idle capacity.
• Automation and Observability: Set up automated monitoring and alerts for resource usage. Quickly identify areas for optimization and adjust capacity according to real-time demand.

Implementation Steps

1. Analyze Workload Requirements: Identify areas with high resource consumption and consider alternatives that reduce operational overhead.
2. Adopt Optimal Data Patterns: Evaluate using caching or read replicas to reduce database load, and systematically clean up stale data.
3. Iterate and Improve: Continuously monitor key sustainability metrics and refine your architecture to further minimize energy usage.

These strategies not only advance your organization’s environmental impact goals but also enhance overall cost-effectiveness and application performance.