Configure Amazon EKS for environmental sustainability

This article provides guidance on configuring Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) for environmental sustainability, through the lens of the Sustainability Pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Specifically, the article covers:

• Using AWS Fargate for efficient operations on Amazon EKS
• Running efficient compute on Amazon EC2 instances serving as worker nodes, including:
  • Using the latest version of Kubernetes
  • Using Karpenter for cluster autoscaling
  • Using instance types with least impact (e.g. Graviton, Trainium)
  • Using right capacity type (Spot, On-Demand)
  • Configuring efficient placement and minimizing data movement
  • Using pod allocation strategies that minimize idle resources
  • Workload consolidation and node expiration
  • Monitoring and right-sizing compute resources
  • Using Limit Ranges and Resource Quotas to constrain resource consumption
• Efficient data management practices, including:
  • Using shared storage (EFS, FSx) for stateful applications
  • Using EBS for non-shared storage and low latency use cases
  • Considering object storage (S3) for infrequently accessed data
  • Collecting appropriate storage metrics
  • Minimizing data movement through caching, topology aware hints and affinity rules
• Conclusion and further reading