# Sustainability
<a name="sustainability"></a>

 The sustainability pillar helps you reduce your workload's environmental impact while optimizing costs. By improving energy efficiency and resource utilization across your architecture components, you can decrease both carbon emissions and operational expenses. 

 Environmental sustainability extends beyond carbon reduction to include economic, social, and ecological considerations. To address climate change, organizations can implement resource-efficient architectures that minimize waste and use renewable energy sources. This pillar shows you how to deploy and maintain OpenSearch nodes with sustainability best practices that reduce both carbon emissions and costs. 

**Topics**
+ [Design principles](#design-principles-sus)
+ [Region selection](region-selection.md)
+ [Software and architecture](software-and-architecture.md)
+ [Data management](data-management-sus.md)
+ [Process and culture](process-and-culture-sus.md)
+ [Key AWS services](key-aws-services-sus.md)
+ [Resources](resources-sus.md)

## Design principles
<a name="design-principles-sus"></a>
+  **Choose Regions strategically:** Choose Regions based on business requirements and sustainability goals, considering factors like energy consumption, carbon footprint, and proximity to users. 
+  **Select sustainable instance families:** Select instance families that align with your sustainability objectives, such as Graviton-based instances, which are more environmentally friendly due to their reduced energy consumption. 
+  **Optimize resource utilization:** Optimize resource utilization by using the minimum number of instances required, reducing unnecessary data, and using Index State Management (ISM) to manage dataset lifecycle. 
+  **Consolidate workloads:** Consolidate development and test workloads into fewer OpenSearch domains, using security features for protection and reducing the overall environmental impact.