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Eco-Conscious Engineering: AWS Champions Cost-Efficient Sustainability

Dr. Werner Vogels, the CTO at AWS, dedicated the initial portion of his re:Invent keynote to elaborating on the principles of economical architectures, cloud-native designs that strive to offer budget-conscious, sustainable, and maintainable solutions. Vogels outlined seven straightforward principles based on his and AWS’ experience crafting and advancing cloud platform services, with cost considerations being a significant factor.

The CTO presented the concluding keynote at the event, which featured numerous new capabilities and functionalities. Utilizing Matrix-inspired video segments, Vogels humorously introduced the subject of cost-awareness in cloud designs as a proxy for sustainability. He specifically detailed seven principles, which are further explained on the designated website.



The Frugal Architect Handbook (Source: The Frugal Architect Website)

Vogels maintains that cost should be regarded as one of the non-functional requirements, and businesses or products can fail if costs are not considered early on. He also argues that costs should align with the business model, necessitating the identification of the primary dimension for generating revenues and profits. Additionally, the AWS’ CTO highlights that designing architectures involves several trade-offs, and companies need to strike the right balance between technical and business needs, focused on maximizing value rather than merely minimizing costs.

The fourth law asserts that unmonitored systems lead to unknown costs, emphasizing the importance of tracking costs from the beginning to encourage more cost-effective and sustainable solutions. To manage costs, Vogels suggests categorizing system components by criticality and adjusting the cost needed to ensure availability and resilience based on how business-critical these tiers are. Law no. 6 states that cost optimization is incremental, and organizations should persistently aim to lower the costs of running systems by streamlining infrastructure footprint, profiling and optimizing applications, and monitoring systems to identify waste and eliminate inefficiencies. Finally, Vogels urges everyone to challenge assumptions to avoid the trap of using the same approach or technologies due to past experiences or the current norm.

The keynote unexpectedly sparked numerous remarks within the community. On the Reddit thread, the user syphoon commented:

While I tend to favor views that confirm my existing beliefs, I do value this as an authoritative counter to the “build with as many AWS icons in our […] diagrams as possible and then 3 years later panic about spend” strategy that occurred at my last two places of work.

Tracy Woo, principal analyst at Forrester, summarized the frugal architect discussion as a silent acknowledgment to the FinOps community, noting that AWS has joined the FinOps Foundation and, more recently, also joined the FOCUS project as part of the steering committee. The project is focused on developing the technical specification of an open standard for cloud cost, usage, and billing data across all major cloud service providers.

Among the responses to Woo’s analysis, Arwel Owen shared his perspective on the frugal architect initiative:

[…] Werner’s Frugal Architect principles concentrate on designing for cost as a means to drive sustainability. While this is a commendable cause, I believe it should be the opposite – design for sustainability as a means to achieve cost savings.


I say this because not all cost reductions lead to lower carbon emissions, e.g. choosing a 3yr Reserved Instance over a 1yr deal may reduce cost, but doesn’t necessarily cut carbon. However, most cloud architecture decisions that reduce carbon emissions also lower costs, e.g. Shutting down services overnight and on weekends will lower both CO2 emissions and costs when combined with PAYG pricing.


Replace the word ‘cost’ with ‘carbon’ when reading the Frugal Architect principles, and you won’t go far wrong.

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