AWS Well-Architected Framework

Guide designed to help you build the most secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient architectures. Contains best practices and tips.

• It has 6 pillars → Each one has set of principles + best practices.
• Well-Architected Tool → Tool that provides a consistent process for measuring your architecture against AWS best practices (the framework).

1. Operational Excellence

Focus → Ability to run + monitor systems to deliver business value and continuously improve processes.

Design Principles:

• Perform operations as code → Limits human error.
• Annotate documentation → Automate documentation after every build.
• Make frequent, small, reversible changes → Design workloads to be able to handle component updates and make changes in small increments.
• Refine operations procedure frequently → Look for opportunities to improve procedures.
• Anticipate failure → Identify potential sources of failure to remove or mitigate them and test failure scenarios.
• Learn from all operational events and failures → Share events with others within business.

Best practice areas:

• Prepare
• Operate
• Evolve

2. Security

Focus → Ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessment and mitigation strategies.

Design Principles:

• Implement a strong identity foundation → Principle of least privilege and enforce separation of duties with proper identification for each one.
• Enable traceability → Monitor, alert, and audit actions and changes of your system in real time. Integrate logs to apply automatic actions
• Apply security at all layers → Defense in-depth and apply security controls at each level of architecture.
• Automate security best practices → Automate security measures to scale more rapidly.
• Protect data in transit and at rest → Classify data at different levels and use techniques to protect it.
• Keep people away from data → Reduce risk of loss/modification of data due to human error.
• Prepare for security events → Have an incident management process that aligns with organizational requirements. Run simulations to be more prepared.

Best practice areas:

• Identity and access management
• Detective controls
• Infrastructure protection
• Data protection
• Incident response

3. Reliability

Focus → Prevent and quickly recover from failures to meet business and customer demand.

Design Principles:

• Test recovery procedures → Test how systems fail and validate procedures.
• Automatically recover from failure → Monitor systems for key performance indicators and trigger automatic recovery.
• Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability → Replace large resource with multiple smaller and distribute requests among smaller resources to reduce SPOF.
• Stop guessing capacity → Monitor demand and system usage and automate addition/removal of resources to satisfy demand.
• Manage change in automation → Use automation to make changes in infrastructure and make changes to automation.

Best practice areas:

• Foundations
• Change management
• Failure management

4. Performance Efficiency

Focus → Use IT and computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and maintain efficiency as demand and technologies evolve.

Design Principles:

• Democratize advanced technologies → Consume new technologies to focus on applications instead of provisioning.
• Go global in minutes → Deploy systems in multiple regions for better latency and experience.
• Use serverless architectures → Remove operational burden of servers, can reduce costs.
• Experiment more often → Perform comparative testings of different technologies.
• Have mechanical sympathy → Use the best technology approach that aligns with what you are trying to achieve.

Best practice areas:

• Selection
• Review
• Monitoring → To ensure performance
• Tradeoffs → To improve performance

5. Cost Optimization

Focus → Run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point.

Design Principles:

• Adopt a consumption model → Pay only for what is required and used.
• Measure overall efficiency → Measure business output of the workload and its associated costs.
• Stop spending money on data center operations → AWS does this, you focus on projects and operations.
• Analyze and attribute expenditure → It is easy in the cloud to separate costs per workload, can measure ROI.
• Use managed and application-level services to reduce cost of ownership → Reduce operational burden for simple tasks.

Best practice areas:

• Expenditure awareness
• Cost-effective resources
• Matching supply and demand
• Optimizing over time → How you evaluate new resources over time.

6. Sustainability