Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Sustainable architecture: Past, present, and future (SUS302)

Summary

Steffen Grunwald, Solutions Architect at AWS, discusses the evolution of sustainable architectures and how AWS helps customers build them.
He reviews the past focus on resource efficiency due to static infrastructure boundaries and how AWS EC2 changed that by allowing dynamic scaling.
Grunwald highlights the shift towards sustainability in IT, driven by awareness of climate change and initiatives like the Climate Pledge.
He introduces the greenhouse gas protocol's three scopes of emissions and the importance of carbon accounting.
The AWS Well-Architected Framework, including the sustainability pillar, is presented as a tool for evaluating cloud workloads.
Grunwald demonstrates the Cloud Intelligence Dashboards for sustainability metrics and shares customer examples from TUI and VMware.
He discusses AWS's commitment to renewable energy and water positivity, and the role of customer signals in optimizing resource efficiency.
AWS tools like the Customer Carbon Footprint tool, sustainability proxy metrics, KPIs, and the Sustainability Scanner are recommended for optimizing sustainability.
The future of sustainability in IT includes leveraging Gen AI responsibly and applying well-architected best practices across industries.

The transition from static to dynamic infrastructure with the advent of AWS EC2 has allowed for more efficient resource scaling, but also led to increased resource usage due to ease of access.
There is a growing trend in IT to optimize not just for cost and performance but also for environmental impact, reflecting broader societal concerns about sustainability.
AWS's Well-Architected Framework now includes a sustainability pillar, emphasizing the shared responsibility between AWS and customers in achieving sustainable outcomes.
AWS provides tools like the Customer Carbon Footprint tool and Cloud Intelligence Dashboards to help customers measure and optimize their carbon footprint.
Customer examples demonstrate the practical application of sustainability metrics in optimizing resource usage and achieving sustainability goals.
AWS is making strides towards 100% renewable energy by 2025 and aims to be water positive by 2030, highlighting the company's commitment to sustainability.
AWS encourages customers to provide flexibility signals for workloads, enabling AWS to make more efficient resource trade-offs.
The use of AI in sustainability efforts should be approached with consideration for the environmental impact of training and running AI models.
AWS suggests a multi-faceted approach to sustainability, including tracking progress, reviewing best practices, and using technology to solve broader industry challenges related to sustainability.