AWS Well-Architected Framework

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of practices that enables AWS users, architects and developers to design and architect a secure, high performing, resilient, cost-effective, efficient and reliable system for their applications in the cloud. It allows users to consistently measure their architectures against best practices and identifies areas for improvement.

The framework provides an approach for customers to review their architectures and provides guidance to implement designs that scale with their application needs over time. It provides best practices in the design, delivery and maintenance of AWS environments.

Pillars of a Well-Architected AWS Framework

The framework works on six pillars :

• Operational Excellence
• Security
• Reliability
• Performance efficiency
• Cost optimization
• Sustainability

Operational Excellence

The operational excellence pillar focuses on running the workloads effectively and efficiently while gaining insights into ops and allows organizations to continuously improve processes and procedures to deliver business value. It follows the best practices for organizations to optimize their operations, increase efficiency and enhance the overall performance.

Design Principles:

• Perform Operations as Code: Automates manual processes by implementing your operations procedures as code which limits human errors and ensure consistent response to events.
• Make frequent, small reversible changes: Implements changes in small increments that can be reversed if they fail.
• Refine operations procedures frequently: Keep evolving and improving your processes.
• Anticipate failure: By anticipating and preparing for failure scenarios, you can ensure that your systems work under adverse conditions.
• Learn from all operational failures: Learn from all the failed operations, conduct thorough post-mortems to understand the root cause of failures and work on mitigating them.

Security

The security pillar protects data at rest & in transit, information, system and safeguards assets while delivering business through risk assessments and mitigation strategies. To operate your workload securely, you must apply overarching best practices to every area of security.

Design Principles:

• Implement a strong identity foundation: You can use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to enforce access control policies.
• Enable Traceability: Log, monitor, alert and audit all the activities to provide traceability for security.
• Apply security at all layers: Implementing security measures at all layers of your architecture i.e. network, compute and storage.
• Automate security best practices: Having automated software based security improves your ability to securely scale more rapidly and cost-effectively.
• Protect data in transit and at rest: In order to protect your data encrypt the data both in transit and at rest.
• Keep people away from data: Minimizing human access to data by using automated processes can keep your data secure.
• Prepare for security events: Run incident response simulations and use automated tools to increase your speed for detection and investigation.

Reliability

The reliability pillar ensures that the workload continue to function as expected in case of any failures. It incorporates automatic recovery mechanisms and measures to mitigate disruptions.

Design Principles:

• Automatically recover from failure: It uses automated tools to detect and recover from failures without manual intervention. It monitors a workload for key performance indicators (KPI’s) so you can trigger automation when a threshold is breached.
• Test recovery procedures: Regular testing of recovery procedures are conducted to prove that the workload works as expected.
• Scale horizontally to increase aggregate workload availability: Distributing workloads across multiple instances horizontally will increase the system’s overall availability.
• Stop guessing capacity: Automatically scale resources based on demand.
• Manage change in automation: Changes to your systems or infrastructure should be made using automation.

Performance Efficiency

The fourth pillar, performance efficiency which focuses on the ability to use IT and computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.

Design Principles:

• Democratize advanced technologies: Consume technologies as a service and simplifies the implementation of advanced features.
• Go global in minutes: Deploy systems in multiples AWS Regions to provide lower latency and a better customer experience at minimal cost.
• Use serverless architectures : Utilizes serverless architectures to automatically scale and optimize resource usage based on demand.
• Experiment more often: Performs experiments with different architectures to optimize performance.
• Consider mechanical sympathy: Understand your architecture and then choose services that aligns with the requirements.

Cost Optimization

The cost optimization pillar focuses on analyzing, understanding and controlling where money is being spent and focuses on the ability to avoid unnecessary costs. Scales your resources as to meet business needs without overspending.

Design Principles:

• Implement Cloud Financial Management: To accelerate your businesses in the cloud, you need to invest in cloud financial management.
• Adopt a consumption model: Pay only for what you use.
• Measure overall efficiency: Continuously monitor and optimize usage of your resources.
• Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting
• Analyze and attribute expenditure: Easily identify system usage and costs and attribute IT costs to individual workload owners.

Sustainability

The sustainability pillar tracks your progress toward policies and best practices that support a more sustainable future and not just a simple checklist.

Design Principles:

• Understand your impact: Understand your cloud infrastructure’s environmental, social and economic impact.
• Establish sustainability goal: Plan your growth and design your architecture to reduce the impact per unit of work as per user.
• Maximize utilization: Right sizing each workload
• Anticipate and adopt new, more efficient hardware and software offerings
• Use managed services
• Reduce the aftereffects of your cloud workloads

Conclusion

The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides a set of design principles and best practices to help organization build a secure, efficient, high performing and cost-effective cloud architecture. It consists of six pillars : operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization and sustainability.

AWS Well-Architected Framework – FAQs

What is the purpose of Well-Architected Framework?

It contains the set of practices and design principles users can use to build a secure organization. It’s six pillar’s focuses on that operations work well, protects the data, ensures system operate as expected, optimizes resource usage and minimizes costs.

From where can I use the Well-Architected Framework?

You can use the tool available in the AWS Management Console.

Is the Well-Architecture Framework free to use?

Yes, however there maybe costs associated with implementing certain practices.

Can I use the Well-Architected Framework for existing workloads?

Yes, the framework can be used for existing workloads and in addition to designing new ones as well.