AWS Well-Architected Sustainability pillar review for Terraform
Last reviewed: 2026-07-03
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Last reviewed: 2026-07-03
The AWS Well-Architected Sustainability pillar covers six design principles: understanding your impact, establishing sustainability goals, maximizing utilization, anticipating and adopting more efficient hardware and software offerings, using managed services, and reducing the downstream impact of your workloads. This guide maps each principle to Terraform patterns and explains what ArchGuard evaluates in your HCL.
The Sustainability pillar design principles, as Terraform-aware checks
Five things ArchGuard flags most often in the Sustainability pillar
- ·EC2 instances on x86 instance families with no evaluation of a Graviton (ARM) equivalent for the workload
- ·Steady-state, predictable compute running entirely on On-Demand pricing — no Savings Plans or Reserved Instance coverage
- ·Fault-tolerant, interruption-tolerant workloads (batch jobs, CI runners) not using Spot capacity
- ·Auto Scaling Groups with a high static minimum capacity and no off-hours or scale-to-zero schedule for non-production environments
- ·No lifecycle policy trimming unused EBS snapshots or AMIs — idle storage accumulates indefinitely
Further reading
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