# Performance efficiency
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 The performance efficiency pillar includes the ability to use cloud resources efficiently to meet performance requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve. 

**Topics**
+ [Design principles](design-principles.md)
+ [Definition](definition.md)

# Design principles
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 The following design principles can help you achieve and maintain efficient workloads in the cloud. 
+  **Democratize advanced technologies:** Make advanced technology implementation easier for your team by delegating complex tasks to your cloud vendor. Rather than asking your IT team to learn about hosting and running a new technology, consider consuming the technology as a service. For example, NoSQL databases, media transcoding, and machine learning are all technologies that require specialized expertise. In the cloud, these technologies become services that your team can consume, allowing your team to focus on product development rather than resource provisioning and management. 
+  **Go global in minutes:** Deploying your workload in multiple AWS Regions around the world allows you to provide lower latency and a better experience for your customers at minimal cost. 
+  **Use serverless architectures:** Serverless architectures remove the need for you to run and maintain physical servers for traditional compute activities. For example, serverless storage services can act as static websites (removing the need for web servers) and event services can host code. This removes the operational burden of managing physical servers, and can lower transactional costs because managed services operate at cloud scale. 
+  **Experiment more often:** With virtual and automatable resources, you can quickly carry out comparative testing using different types of instances, storage, or configurations. 
+  **Consider mechanical sympathy:** Use the technology approach that aligns best with your goals. For example, consider data access patterns when you select database or storage for your workload. 

# Definition
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Focus on the following areas to achieve performance efficiency in the cloud:
+  [Architecture selection](architecture-selection.md) 
+  [Compute and hardware](compute-and-hardware.md) 
+  [Data management](data-management.md) 
+  [Networking and content delivery](networking-and-content-delivery.md) 
+  [Process and culture](process-and-culture.md) 

Take a data-driven approach to build a high-performing architecture. Gather data on all aspects of the architecture, from the high-level design to the selection and configuration of resource types.

 Reviewing your choices on a regular basis, ensures that you are taking advantage of the continually evolving AWS Cloud. Monitoring ensures that you are aware of any deviance from expected performance. Make trade-offs in your architecture to improve performance, such as using compression or caching, or relaxing consistency requirements.