# Sustainability pillar The sustainability pillar focuses on the long-term environmental impacts of SaaS products. This pillar helps organizations design and operate their SaaS products in a way that minimizes their environmental footprint: Reducing energy consumption and increasing efficiency across all components of a workload by maximizing the benefits from the provisioned resources and minimizing the total resources required. It helps organizations understand the trade-offs involved in various design and operational decisions and make informed choices that align with their values and long-term business goals. By considering sustainability from the beginning, organizations can create SaaS products that not only meet the needs of their customers but also contribute to a more sustainable future. **Topics** + [ # Definition ](sus-definition.md) + [ # Best practices ](sus-best-practices.md) + [ # Resources ](sus-resources.md) # Definition Optimize workload placement, and optimize your architecture for user, software, data, hardware, and development and deployment patterns to increase energy efficiency. Each of these areas represents opportunities to employ best practices to reduce the sustainability impact of your cloud workload by maximizing utilization, and minimizing waste and the total resources deployed and powered to support your workload. + Region selection + User behavior patterns + Software and architecture patterns + Data patterns + Hardware patterns + Development and deployment patterns # Best practices There are six best practice areas for sustainability in the cloud: **Topics** + [ # Region selection ](region-selection.md) + [ # User behavior patterns ](user-behavior-patterns.md) + [ # Software and architecture patterns ](software-and-architecture-patterns.md) + [ # Data patterns ](data-patterns.md) + [ # Hardware patterns ](hardware-patterns.md) + [ # Development and deployment patterns ](development-and-deployment-patterns.md) Unlike the other pillars, the numbering of the sustainability best practices indicates the estimated complexity of implementing that best practice. We recommend that you consider this order when planning your sustainability improvement plan. + **SaaS SUS 1:** How do you use deployment models (silo, bridge, pool) to align tenant consumption with resource utilization? + **SaaS SUS 2:** How do you maximize the value from the resources that the SaaS environment consumes? + **SaaS SUS 3:** Do you have a tenant off-boarding plan for inactive tenants? How do you decommission tenant resources that are not being used to limit or prevent waste? + **SaaS SUS 4:** How do you provide per-tenant footprint visibility (such as resource utilization and carbon emission data) in your SaaS environment? # Region selection There are no sustainability practices unique to SaaS applications. # User behavior patterns | SaaS SUS 3: Do you have a tenant off-boarding plan for inactive tenants? How do you decommission tenant resources that are not being used to limit or prevent waste? | | --- | | | Each tenant in the SaaS solution has a footprint that includes infrastructure resources such as compute, storage, and relevant data. When a tenant decides to off-board (stop using the SaaS solution), the respective tenant’s footprint should be decommissioned when there is no expectation that the tenant is likely to be re-activated. The faster unused resources can be decommissioned (such as by automating the process), the lower the impact, as decommissioned resources equate to energy saved. Since this process involves data archiving or deletion, it should be described as part of the service level agreement (SLA). + **Best Practice–01:** Keep an updated list of infrastructure resources allocated per tenant. + **Best Practice–02:** Maintain a runbook with a list of steps required to off-board a tenant, and periodically test it in non-production environment to help ensure it’s current. + **Best Practice–03:** Use automation tools to run decommissioning steps to avoid human errors, and speed up the run time. This process should not affect the performance of active tenants. + **Best Practice–04:** Before decommissioning, the SaaS provider should ensure, if required, that a copy of the data is created to meet any audit or compliance requirements, and to restore or reactivate the tenant in the future. + **Best Practice–05:** Start automated decommissioning processes as part of a process approval system, such as a ServiceNow-approved workflow. + **Best Practice–06:** Use auto-scaling to remove capacity as demand change. ** AWS services recommendation:** + [AWS Systems Manager Inventory](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide/systems-manager-inventory.html) provides visibility into your AWS computing environment. + [AWS Config](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/config/latest/developerguide/WhatIsConfig.html) provides a detailed view of the configuration of AWS resources in your AWS account. This includes how the resources are related to one another and how they were configured in the past so that you can see how the configurations and relationships change over time. + [AWS Cost and Usage Report](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cur/latest/userguide/what-is-cur.html) (CUR) with [resource tags](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cur/latest/userguide/resource-tags-columns.html)— You can use the resource columns in AWS Cost and Usage Reports to find information about the specific resources covered by a line item. These columns include user-defined cost allocation tags. + [AWS CloudFormation](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/template-guide.html) templates describe your desired resources and their dependencies so that you can launch and configure them together as a stack. You can use a template to create, update, and delete an entire stack as a single unit, as often as you need to, instead of managing resources individually. + [AWS Step Functions](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/step-functions/latest/dg/welcome.html) provides serverless orchestration for modern applications. Orchestration centrally manages a workflow by breaking it into multiple steps, adding flow logic, and tracking the inputs and outputs between the steps. + [Amazon S3 Inventory](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/storage-inventory.html) provides comma-separated values (CSV), Apache optimized row columnar (ORC), or Apache Parquet output files that list your objects and their corresponding metadata on a daily or weekly basis for an S3 bucket or a shared prefix (that is, objects that have names that begin with a common string). + [Amazon S3 storage classes](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/) (and the Amazon Glacier classes in particular) can be used to store or archive a tenant’s data for long-term retention and with reduced energy consumption. + [Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/autoscaling/) and  [Application Auto Scaling](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/application/userguide/what-is-application-auto-scaling.html) can help you make smart scaling decisions. + [Quick](https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/features/) provides you with data driven analysis and visualization. | SaaS SUS 4: How do you provide per-tenant footprint visibility (such as resource utilization and carbon emission data) in your SaaS environment? | | --- | | | Reflecting the consumption level per tenant creates awareness, visibility into the SaaS solutions’ customers sustainability footprint, and improvement process. + **Best Practice–01:** Instrument your SaaS application to collect metrics at a per-tenant level. The goal is to accurately capture all the activities and consumption patterns of each tenant in your system. + **Best Practice–02:** Use application and system monitoring tools to identify infrastructure usage patterns on a per-tenant basis. This data must contain information that ties it back to the tenant. + **Best Practice–03:** Provide detailed dashboards and visualizations of per-tenant operational data across the different layers of the SaaS solution. This data includes total compute required, such as CPU and memory usage, total data transfer and network costs, and total data and storage costs. The goal is to create a unified view of the per-tenant footprint, which provides useful operational insights in to your SaaS environment. ** AWS services recommendation:** + AWS SaaS Lens guidance on [Tenant-aware Operations](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/saas-lens/tenant-aware-operations.html)— SaaS providers need to be able to view system activity and health through the lens of individual tenants and tenant tiers. This is essential to diagnosing and evaluating the trends and patterns of activity and consumption for individual tenants. + AWS SaaS guidance on [Tenant Activity and Consumption](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/saas-lens/tenant-activity-and-consumption.html)—Provide visibility into how tenants are using your application and imposing load on your system’s architecture. + [Amazon Cloudwatch](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/working_with_metrics.html) and tools from AWS Partners such as DataDog or New Relic can be used to capture and surface per-tenant metrics and consumption data. + [AWS Systems Manager Inventory](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide/systems-manager-inventory.html) provides visibility into your AWS compute environment. + [AWS Cost and Usage Reports](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cur/latest/userguide/what-is-cur.html) (AWS CUR) with [resource tags](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cur/latest/userguide/resource-tags-columns.html)— You can use the resource columns in AWS CUR to find information about the specific resources covered by a line item. These columns include user-defined cost allocation tags. + Tracking SaaS resource and consumption—[This presentation](https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/gpstec309saas-monitoring-creating-a-unified-view-of-multitenant-health-featuring-new-relic) goes through the best practices for capturing and surfacing tenant level consumption patterns using an AWS partner solution. + Use the [AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool](https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-customer-carbon-footprint-tool/)to track, measure, review, and forecast the carbon emissions generated from your AWS usage. # Software and architecture patterns | SaaS SUS 1: How do you use deployment models (silo, bridge, pool) to align tenant consumption with resource utilization? | | --- | | | + **Best Practice–01:** Have a good understanding of the key value and principles behind the silo, pool, and bridge models, including awareness how silo and pool strategies can be applied more granularly across the layers and services of your solution. + **Best Practice–02:** Understand the operational tradeoffs of each model. Build a unified onboarding, operations, and analytics experience spanning any of these models.  + **Best Practice–03:** Have a complete end-to-end automated tenant onboarding process that maps the tenancy models to the resources that are provisioned at each architecture layer or component. Also have detailed insights into the footprint and consumption costs and tradeoffs associated with each of these models SaaS applications can be built using a variety of different architectural models. Regulatory, competitive, strategic, cost efficiency, and market considerations all influence the shape of your SaaS architecture. At the same time, there are strategies and patterns that can be applied when defining the footprint of the components within a SaaS application. These patterns—silo, bridge, and pool—can be applied in combinations to enable the most efficient consumption of infrastructure resources. ** AWS services recommendation:** + AWS WA SaaS Lens guidance on [Architectural model](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/saas-lens/silo-pool-and-bridge-models.html) + [SaaS Tenant Isolation Strategies whitepaper](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/saas-tenant-isolation-strategies/saas-tenant-isolation-strategies.html) + Amazon EKS SaaS reference solution [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/saas-lens/amazon-eks-saas.html](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/saas-lens/amazon-eks-saas.html) + Serverless SaaS reference solution [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/saas-lens/serverless-saas.html](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/saas-lens/serverless-saas.html) # Data patterns There are no sustainability practices unique to SaaS applications. # Hardware patterns | SaaS SUS 2: How do you maximize the value from the resources that the SaaS environment consumes? | | --- | | | SaaS, by its nature, tries to promote the sharing of infrastructure across tenants to maximize efficiency and economies of scale. SaaS providers should continually evaluate their opportunities to maximize infrastructure sharing to promote reduced energy consumption. SaaS providers should have an iterative improvement process that allows them to identify opportunities to limit excess resource consumption. + **Best Practice–01:** Use managed services to shift the responsibility for maintaining optimal utilization of the deployed hardware to AWS. + **Best Practice–02:** Right-size compute resources based on your architecture and iteratively optimize by tracking utilization, and use auto-scaling to handle peak system load. + **Best Practice–03:** Use serverless computing and other managed services to automatically scale resources as needed, eliminates tasks for infrastructure provisioning and management, and resources utilization is optimized.  ** AWS services recommendation:** + [AWS Compute Optimizer](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/compute-optimizer/index.html) analyzes the configuration and utilization metrics of your AWS resources. It reports whether your resources are optimal, and generates optimization recommendations. + [Amazon CloudWatch metrics](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/working_with_metrics.html) provide data about the performance of your system, for example, CPU utilization. + [Auto Scaling](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/index.html)—AWS provides multiple services that you can use to scale your application. + Examples of AWS managed services: + [Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/) + [AWS Fargate](https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/) + [Amazon Redshift](https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/) + [Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)](https://aws.amazon.com/msk/) + [Amazon DynamoDB](https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/) + [Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)](https://aws.amazon.com/eks/) + [Lab—Rightsizing Recommendations](https://wellarchitectedlabs.com/cost/100_labs/100_aws_resource_optimization/) + [Serverless on AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/) helps you build and run applications without thinking about servers, capacity sizing and provisioning, and maintenance. # Development and deployment patterns There are no sustainability practices unique to SaaS applications. # Resources Refer to the following resources to learn more about AWS best practices for sustainability. **Documentation and blogs** + [Building Sustainable, Efficient, and Cost-Optimized Applications on AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/building-sustainable-efficient-and-cost-optimized-applications-on-aws/) + [Optimize your AWS Infrastructure for Sustainability](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/optimizing-your-aws-infrastructure-for-sustainability-part-i-compute/) (a three-part blog series) + [Best Practices from IBM and AWS for Optimizing SaaS Solutions for Sustainability](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/best-practices-from-ibm-and-aws-for-optimizing-saas-solutions-for-sustainability/) + [Let’s Architect\$1 Architecting for sustainability](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/lets-architect-architecting-for-sustainability/) + [How to select a Region for your workload based on sustainability goals](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/how-to-select-a-region-for-your-workload-based-on-sustainability-goals/) **Labs** + [AWS Well-Architected Labs for Sustainability Pillar](https://wellarchitectedlabs.com/sustainability/) + [AWS Well-Architected Labs – Cloud Intelligence Dashboards](https://wellarchitectedlabs.com/cost/200_labs/200_cloud_intelligence/)