DRHCSUS06-BP01 Monitor Local Zone hardware introductions, and choose the latest EC2 Instances to take advantage of energy efficiency improvements

As new more powerful and efficient Amazon EC2 instance families are introduced into AWS Local Zones they should be adopted to reduce the number of EC2 instances used and overall energy consumption.

Desired outcome: You use most energy efficient and performant Amazon EC2 offerings to deploy workloads.

Benefits of establishing this best practice: By adopting the latest Amazon EC2 families, it may be possible to reduce the number of Amazon EC2 instances needed to support your data-residency workloads.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Medium

Implementation guidance

Monitor AWS Local Zones features to discover the latest generation of Amazon EC2 instances, and use these whenever possible. New Amazon EC2 instance types often incorporate energy efficiency improvements using the latest Intel processor families or AWS-optimized processor architectures such as AWS Graviton. Some of the latest instance types integrate specialized hardware accelerators such as GPUs or FPGAs to offload compute-intensive tasks from the CPU, resulting in overall improved performance per watt. This improved performance per watt in turn reduces energy consumption to help meet your sustainability goals and improve performance for data residency workloads.