The continuous growing usage of cloud resources produces a non-negligible portion of energy consumption of the world. To counteract this trend, an active and resolute acting is needed. This acting starts by focusing on the right respective needed business function to avoid “waste” by design and goes through the development process into the operation of a cloud service. All life-cycle phases have to contribute to the overall energy footprint reduction of the cloud resources consuming service. An approach for sustainability engineering is presented which is based on general available methods and techniques, but often not systematic used to improve service sustainability. The approach focuses mainly on systematic avoidance and reduction of resource allocations for service delivery. The focus of the presented approach is (hybrid) cloud-native services based on microservice-based container workloads. The suggested approach shows on an example cloud service presented as case study the effects of systematic sustainability engineering to make the service more eco-friendly. It presents the typical trade-offs between different quality characteristics to balance them to an overall adequate solution.