Implementation Patterns and Best Practices for Sustainability
In terms of patterns and practices, there are four distinct areas you can focus on for sustainability as part of your daily consumption of cloud services:
- User behavior
- Software architecture
- Data and storage
- Development and deployment
The following sections discuss each of these in detail.
User Behavior
When you release a new feature, you assess how your consumers use it so that you can identify issues and make enhancements quickly. With sustainability thinking, you must add measures to align with your sustainability goals as well.
For example, suppose your customers use the application during regular office hours in a particular region. In that case, you do not need to run all the cloud resources during out-of-office hours. You plan to be efficient in resource consumption, which, in turn, enables energy efficiency. This section presents you with best practices based on the usage of your applications and the consumers’ behavior.
Serverless-first thinking is the first and foremost user behavior pattern for sustainability in the cloud.
Understanding consumer demand
Observability is a key characteristic of a sustainable serverless application. The sur‐ vival of your application and the value it brings to your business depend on how visible its functioning is. Knowledge of the usage of your application is a key factor that forms the basis of your contribution to sustainability in the cloud. Here are some best practices surrounding consumer demand:
Use the minimum resources necessary to meet the demand.
The managed cloud services have built-in elasticity to scale on demand. You do not need to overprovision resources as the platform will scale up and down depending on the demand.
Remove expired customer content promptly.
In several situations, your application uses data for operational purposes and it is not needed in the long term. To reduce your storage consumption, you should remove any customer content that you’re storing when it is no longer needed for business purposes.
“Data and Storage” on page 426 explains the sustainability best practices for handling data in detail.
Scale as per the service level agreement, and not over.
Chapter 1 briefly mentioned optimizing your application for sustainability. Tra‐ ditionally, scaling and optimization techniques have focused on the cost and performance of an application. With sustainability as the third element, you need to balance the trade-offs between them carefully.
The general rule of thumb is that if you optimize for cost, you will likely favor sustainability as your application will consume fewer resources. However, if you scale to target the highest performance factor, you will likely consume more resources than you need to meet your application’s SLA.
