# The shared responsibility model
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 Environmental sustainability is a shared responsibility between customers and AWS. 
+  AWS is responsible for optimizing the sustainability *of* the cloud – delivering efficient, shared infrastructure, water stewardship, and sourcing renewable power. 
+  Customers are responsible for sustainability *in* the cloud – optimizing workloads and resource utilization, and minimizing the total resources required to be deployed for your workloads. 

![\[Diagram showing the AWS shared responsibility model.\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/sustainability-pillar/images/sustainability-in-the-cloud.jpeg)


## Sustainability of the cloud
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 Cloud providers have a lower carbon footprint and are more energy efficient than typical on-premises alternatives because they invest in efficient power and cooling technology, operate energy efficient server populations, and achieve high server utilization rates. Cloud workloads reduce impact by taking advantage of shared resources, such as networking, power, cooling, and physical facilities. You can migrate your cloud workloads to more efficient technologies as they become available and use cloud-based services to transform your workloads for better sustainability. 

### Resources
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+  [The Carbon Reduction Opportunity of Moving to Amazon Web Services](https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/carbon_reduction_aws.pdf) 
+  [AWS enables sustainability solutions](https://aws.amazon.com/sustainability/) 

## Sustainability in the cloud
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 Sustainability in the cloud is a continuous effort focused primarily on energy reduction and efficiency across all components of a workload by achieving the maximum benefit from the resources provisioned and minimizing the total resources required. This effort can range from the initial selection of an efficient programming language, adoption of modern algorithms, use of efficient data storage techniques, deploying to correctly sized and efficient compute infrastructure, and minimizing requirements for high-powered end-user hardware.