Cost Optimization
The goal of the cost optimization pillar is quite simple: to save money and stop wasting investments in technology.
The design goals are also straightforward:
Implement Cloud Financial Management (CFM): CFM refers to the set of practices, tools, and strategies that organizations use to manage their finances and control costs in the context of cloud computing. Aspects of a solid CFM approach include tasks such as cost management and allocation, budgeting and forecasting, cost optimization, right-sizing, and tagging and labeling cloud resources.
Adopt a consumption model (which emphasizes the OpEx approach to IT): With your move to AWS, you can start paying for only the resources that you need, including temporary resources. For example, if you need a staging or test environment while you are improving one of your solutions, you can spin it up, do your testing, and then shut it off or even shut it off and delete it.
Measure the efficiency of your architecture closely: AWS makes this simple with many cost-related tools we will be covering in this text. It is very easy to make changes and then monitor the financial implications of those changes. You typically have much greater visibility into the cost of your solutions with the AWS Cloud than you would have in a traditional environment.
Stop spending money needlessly to try to solve IT problems: AWS inherently makes this design goal possible. You no longer have to worry about buying new server racks, new cabling, new storage arrays, and so on when it comes to the latest advanced technologies.
Closely analyze the expenditures in your AWS implementation: Here is another design goal that AWS makes simple, thanks to the numerous tools available for tracking costs. You can even use tagging and labeling of your AWS resources so that it is easy to attribute your costs to specific solutions, departments, or teams. Your internal accountants should love this new ability.
Sustainability
AWS would like to be kinder to the environment, and as a result, the sustainability pillar was added to the AWS Well-Architected Framework during the re:Invent 2021 conference. The goal of this pillar is a lofty one: to try to help customers minimize the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads. For the development of this pillar, AWS looked to the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development, whose definition of sustainability encourages development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
The major design principles for this newer pillar of the architecture are as follows:
Understand your impact: AWS allows you to quantify the influence of your cloud workload and forecast its future ramifications. This evaluation should encompass all sources of impact, encompassing impacts arising from customer product utilization and the ultimate product phase-out and retirement. You can analyze the resources and emissions needed per unit of work and compare them against the overall impact of your cloud workloads. This information can serve as the foundation for establishing key performance indicators (KPIs), assessing strategies to enhance productivity while minimizing impact, and projecting the impact of proposed alterations over time.
Establish sustainability goals: It is important to define enduring sustainability objectives for each cloud workload, such as the reduction of compute and storage resources needed per transaction. You should also create return on investment (ROI) models to assess the sustainability enhancements for current workloads and provide workload owners with the necessary resources to invest in achieving these sustainability goals.
Maximize utilization: This principle might seem counterintuitive, but AWS is saying that you should not overprovision your resources. Sadly, overprovisioning is very common in traditional IT environments, where capacity is often handled by allocating and provisioning many more resources than are actually required. With AWS, you can right-size the resources you need to consume.
Anticipate and adopt new, more efficient hardware and software offerings: Here is another design principle where AWS helps you by default. AWS is constantly making newer and more efficient technologies available to you and using them itself.
Use managed services: When you call upon the massively popular managed services of AWS (for example, S3 storage), you are taking advantage of the efficient maximization of resources principle. AWS has appropriated truly massive amounts of resources and helps you use them efficiently. This is much better for the environment than for each AWS customer across the globe to try to create their own resources.
Reduce the downstream impact of your cloud workloads: To help achieve this design principle, you can take several steps. First, reduce the amount of energy or resources required to use your services. Next, reduce the need for customers to upgrade their devices to use your services. Finally, test solutions with customers to understand the actual impact from using your services.