Well Architected Framework and Review

Well Architected Framework & Review

The Well-Architected Framework has been developed to help customers build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications. Based on five pillars – operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization – the Framework provides a consistent approach for customers to evaluate architectures, and implement designs that will scale over time.

Operational Excellence:

It’s the ability to run and monitor systems that deliver business value and continuously improve supporting processes and procedures. AWS outlines best practices in six design principles:

  • Perform operations as code

  • Annotated documentation

  • Make frequent, small, reversible changes

  • Refine operations procedures frequently

  • Anticipate failure

  • Learn from all operational failures

Security:

It’s having the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies. When implementing security on your architecture, Amazon recommends six design principles:

  • Implement a strong identity foundation

  • Enable traceability

  • Apply security at all layers

  • Automate security best practices

  • Protect data in transit and at rest

  • Keep people away from data and prepare for security events

Reliability:

It’s making sure the system is capable of recovering from infrastructure or service disruptions, meeting demand for acquiring computing resources, and mitigating disruptions and network issues. To increase reliability, AWS recommends:

  • Test recovery procedures

  • Automatically recover from failure

  • Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability

  • Stop guessing capacity

  • Manage change in automation

Performance Efficiency:

It’s optimally using resources to meet requirements as demand changes and as technology evolves. In order to achieve performance efficiency, there are five principles of best practices:

  • Democratize advanced technologies by pushing difficult technologies into the cloud vendor’s domain

  • Go global in minutes

  • Use serverless architectures to help you quickly deploy your system in multiple regions and remove the need to traditionally run and maintain servers

  • Use the technology approach to create mechanical sympathy

Cost Optimization:

It’s the ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point. To optimize for the lowest cost:

  • Adopt a consumption model

  • Measure overall efficiency by understanding the gains made from increasing output to reduce costs

  • Stop spending money on data center operations

  • Analyze and attribute expenditure

  • Use managed services to reduce the ownership cost