4.11 Use the Lowest Infrastructure Tier Meeting Business Requirements
Select infrastructure with minimal specifications meeting business requirements of performance, availability, etc.
Criteria
- Lowest Requirements: Select infrastructure elements with the lowest requirements tier, meeting your service-level agreements. Avoid over-provisioning multi-datacenter, multi-zone, or distributed deployments if standalone instances meet the requirements. Also avoid provisioning infrastructure that will be under-utilized by provisioning for established average loads, ensuring reasonable resource utilization and autoscaling occurs as needed. Avoid provisioning for peak loads.
Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium
Benefits
- Environmental:
Reduces the size and intensity of the compute. - Economic:
The right-sized compute will typically be the cheapest solution.
GRI
- materials: Low
- energy: Low
- water: Low
- emissions: Low
Example
- Have scheduled automatic scale-up during business hours, and scale-down afterward. Alternatively, have autoscaling (up and down) in direct response to traffic.
Resources
- AWS WAF: SUS02-BP02 – Align SLAs with sustainability goals
- AWS WAF: SUS02-BP06 – Implement buffering or throttling to flatten the demand curve
- AWS WAF: SUS04-BP08 – Back up data only when difficult to recreate
- Can Reducing Cloud Waste Help Save the Planet?
- Choose wisely — How technology decisions drive data center efficiency
- [GPFEDS] 3.2 – Architecture (Resource Tailoring) (PDF)
- Measuring the Emissions & Energy Footprint of the ICT Sector
- Optimizing your AWS Infrastructure for Sustainability, Part I: Compute
- Study on the practical application of the new framework methodology for measuring the environmental impact of your equipment
- United Nations [SDGS] Goal 6 (Water & Sanitation)
- United Nations [SDGS] Goal 7 (Sustainable Energy)
- United Nations [SDGS] Goal 9 (Infrastructure)
- United Nations [SDGS] Goal 12 (Consumption & Production)