⭐ Repository → 💼 AWS Well-Architected → 💼 Sustainability → 💼 Hardware and services

💼 SUS05-BP01 Use the minimum amount of hardware to meet your needs

• ID: /frameworks/aws-well-architected/sustainability/hardware-and-services/bp01

Description

Use the minimum amount of hardware for your workload to efficiently meet your business needs.

Common anti-patterns

• You do not monitor resource utilization.
• You have resources with a low utilization level in your architecture.
• You do not review the utilization of static hardware to determine if it should be resized.
• You do not set hardware utilization goals for your compute infrastructure based on business KPIs.

Benefits of establishing this best practice

Rightsizing your cloud resources helps to reduce a workload’s environmental impact, save money, and maintain performance benchmarks.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Medium

Implementation guidance

Optimally select the total number of hardware required for your workload to improve its overall efficiency. The AWS Cloud provides the flexibility to expand or reduce the number of resources dynamically through a variety of mechanisms, such as AWS Auto Scaling, and meet changes in demand. It also provides APIs and SDKs that allow resources to be modified with minimal effort. Use these capabilities to make frequent changes to your workload implementations. Additionally, use rightsizing guidelines from AWS tools to efficiently operate your cloud resource and meet your business needs.

Implementation steps

1. Choose the instances type: Choose the right instances type to best fit your needs.

2. Scale: Use small increments to scale variable workloads.

3. Use multiple compute purchase options: Balance instance flexibility, scalability, and cost savings with multiple compute purchase options.

   • Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances are best suited for new, stateful, and spiky workloads which can’t be instance type, location, or time flexible.
   • Amazon EC2 Spot Instances are a great way to supplement the other options for applications that are fault tolerant and flexible.
   • Leverage Compute Savings Plans for steady state workloads that allow flexibility if your needs (like AZ, Region, instance families, or instance types) change.

4. Use instance and Availability Zone diversity: Maximize application availability and take advantage of excess capacity by diversifying your instances and Availability Zones.

5. Rightsize instances: Use the rightsizing recommendations from AWS tools to make adjustments on your workload.

   • Use rightsizing recommendations in AWS Cost Explorer or AWS Compute Optimizer to identify rightsizing opportunities.

6. Negotiate service-level agreements (SLAs): Negotiate SLAs that permit temporarily reducing capacity while automation deploys replacement resources.

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