Well-Architected Framework: Sustainability pillar

Last reviewed 2026-01-28 UTC

The sustainability pillar in the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework provides recommendations to design, build, and manage workloads in Google Cloud that are energy-efficient and carbon-aware.

The target audience for this document includes decision-makers, architects, administrators, developers, and operators who design, build, deploy, and maintain workloads in Google Cloud.

Architectural and operational decisions have a significant impact on the energy usage, water impact, and carbon footprint that's driven by your workloads in the cloud. Every workload, whether it's a small website or a large-scale ML model, consumes energy and contributes to carbon emissions and water resource intensity. When you integrate sustainability into your cloud architecture and design process, you build systems that are efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally sustainable. A sustainable architecture is resilient and optimized, which creates a positive feedback loop of higher efficiency, lower cost, and lower environmental impact.

Sustainable by design: Holistic business outcomes

Sustainability isn't a trade-off against other core business objectives; sustainability practices help to accelerate your other business objectives. Architecture choices that prioritize low-carbon resources and operations help you build systems that are also faster, cheaper, and more secure. Such systems are considered to be sustainable by design, where optimizing for sustainability leads to overall positive outcomes for performance, cost, security, resilience, and user experience.

Performance optimization

Systems that are optimized for performance inherently use fewer resources. An efficient application that completes a task faster requires compute resources for a shorter duration. Therefore, the underlying hardware consumes less kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy. Optimized performance also leads to lower latency and better user experience. Time and energy aren't wasted by resources waiting on inefficient processes. When you use specialized hardware (for example, GPUs and TPUs), adopt efficient algorithms, and maximize parallel processing, you improve performance and reduce the carbon footprint of your cloud workload.

Cost optimization

Cloud operational expenditure depends on resource usage. Due to this direct correlation, when you continuously optimize cost, you also reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions. When you right-size VMs, implement aggressive autoscaling, archive old data, and eliminate idle resources, you reduce resource usage and cloud costs. You also reduce the carbon footprint of your systems, because the data centers consume less energy to run your workloads.

Security and resilience

Security and reliability are prerequisites for a sustainable cloud environment. A compromised system—for example, a system that's affected by a denial of service (DoS) attack or an unauthorized data breach—can dramatically increase resource consumption. These incidents can trigger massive spikes in traffic, create runaway compute cycles for mitigation, and necessitate lengthy, high-energy operations for forensic analysis, cleanup, and data restoration. Strong security measures can help to prevent unnecessary spikes in resource usage, so that your operations remain stable, predictable, and energy-efficient.

User experience

Systems that prioritize efficiency, performance, accessibility, and minimal use of data can help to reduce energy usage by end users. An application that loads a smaller model or processes less data to deliver results faster helps to reduce the energy that's consumed by network devices and end-user devices. This reduction in energy usage particularly benefits users who have limited bandwidth or who use older devices. Further, sustainable architecture helps to minimize planetary harm and demonstrates your commitment to socially responsible technology.

Sustainability value of migrating to the cloud

Migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud can help to reduce your organization's environmental footprint. The transition to cloud infrastructure can reduce energy usage and associated emissions by 1.4 to 2 times when compared to typical on-premises deployments. Cloud data centers are modern, custom-designed facilities that are built for high power usage effectiveness (PUE). Older on-premises data centers often lack the scale that's necessary to justify investments in advanced cooling and power distribution systems.

Shared responsibility and shared fate

Shared responsibilities and shared fate on Google Cloud describes how security for cloud workloads is a shared responsibility between Google and you, the customer. This shared responsibility model also applies to sustainability.

Google is responsible for the sustainability of Google Cloud, which means the energy efficiency and water stewardship of our data centers, infrastructure, and core services. We invest continuously in renewable energy, climate-conscious cooling, and hardware optimization. For more information about Google's sustainability strategy and progress, see Google Sustainability 2025 Environmental Report.

You, the customer, are responsible for sustainability in the cloud, which means optimizing your workloads to be energy efficient. For example, you can right-size resources, use serverless services that scale to zero, and manage data lifecycles effectively.

We also advocate a shared fate model: sustainability isn't just a division of tasks but a collaborative partnership between you and Google to reduce the environmental footprint for the entire ecosystem.

Use AI for business impact

The sustainability pillar of the Well-Architected Framework (this document) includes guidance to help you design sustainable AI systems. However, a comprehensive sustainability strategy extends beyond the environmental impact of AI workloads. The strategy should include ways to use AI to optimize operations and create new business value.

AI serves as a catalyst for sustainability by transforming vast datasets into actionable insights. It enables organizations to transition from reactive compliance to proactive optimization, such as in the following areas:

  • Operational efficiency: Streamline operations through improved inventory management, supply chain optimization, and intelligent energy management.
  • Transparency and risk: Use data for granular supply chain transparency, regulatory compliance, and climate risk modeling.
  • Value and growth: Develop new revenue streams in sustainable finance and recommerce.

Google offers the following products and features to help you derive insights from data and build capabilities for a sustainable future:

  • Google Earth AI: Uses planetary-scale geospatial data to analyze environmental changes and monitor supply chain impacts.
  • WeatherNext: Provides advanced weather forecasting and climate risk analytics to help you build resilience against climate volatility.
  • Geospatial insights with Google Earth: Uses geospatial data to add rich contextual data to locations, which enables smarter site selection, resource planning, and operations.
  • Google Maps routes optimization: Optimizes logistics and delivery routes to increase efficiency and reduce fuel consumption and transportation emissions.

Collaborations with partners and customers

Google Cloud and TELUS have partnered to advance cloud sustainability by migrating workloads to Google's carbon-neutral infrastructure and leveraging data analytics to optimize operations. This collaboration provides social and environmental benefits through initiatives like smart-city technology, which uses real-time data to reduce traffic congestion and carbon emissions across municipalities in Canada. For more information about this collaboration, see Google Cloud and TELUS collaborate for sustainability.

Core principles

The recommendations in the sustainability pillar of the Well-Architected Framework are mapped to the following core principles:

Contributors

Author: Brett Tackaberry | Principal Architect

Other contributors:

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