Well-Architected Custom Lens - Sustainability Pillar

In September 2021, we organized AWS Community Day and one of the topics of the talks was Sustainability. We also had a chat about it with Jeff Barr, and asked him if we would ever see Sustainability as one of the new Well-Architected Pillars. So, I believe we triggered AWS with that question.

I expect the Sustainability Pillar soon to be added to the Well-Architected Tool. But, at this moment, it’s limited to the default of 5 previous pillars (operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization).

During some meetings yesterday, I created a Custom Lens for Sustainability. So you can already start reviewing the Sustainability Pillar using the Well-Architected Tool, Today.

sustainability_pillar.json (Right Click, Save Link As)

To publish a custom lens:

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the AWS Well-Architected Tool console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/.
2. In the left navigation pane, choose Custom lenses.
3. Select the desired custom lens and choose Publish lens.
4. In the Version name box, enter a unique identifier for the version change. This value can be up to 32 characters and must only contain alphanumeric characters and periods (".").
5. Choose Publish custom lens.

After a custom lens has been published, it’s in PUBLISHED status.

The custom lens can now be applied to workloads or shared with other AWS accounts or IAM users.

Good to know:

• I copied all data from the official AWS appendix in the documentation.
• I didn’t thought through the no, medium, high risk assessment yet. I kept it easy for now: if none of the best practices are checked within a question, the result is a HIGH_RISK. If all best practices are checked, the result is: NO_RISK. If any of the best practices is not checked (1 or more), the result is: MEDIUM_RISK.
• The info and improvement both contain the same information text.

I do want to fix issues if I see any or somebody reports it. I might consider very small increments. But I’ll hold big changes, because I expect the Pillar to be added by AWS soon.

(PS. If somebody else did this job before: I searched online if somebody created a custom lens for this pillar, but couldn’t find any.)