What is AWS Well-Architected Framework

This tool helps architects design cloud structures based on six pillars set up in order to support a trusted infrastructure for applications and workloads. These pillars describe key concepts and best practices to run workloads in the cloud environment. What Well-Architected pillars will help your data centers thrive and stay safe?

Operational Excellence

This pillar was designed to keep enterprise operation as efficient as possible, automate changes as well as improve procedures to deliver actual business value.

The Operational Excellence Pillar is adjusted to business objectives defined by your organization’s leadership team. That is why it’s important to make sure that the whole company has a shared understanding of the workload and supports the agenda.

Your AWS cloud partner can help you achieve your business goals by:

• Turning operations into code – in order to limit human error,

• Making frequent and small changes – in order to update them on a regular basis,

• Refining procedures – in order to review and familiarize teams with the rules,

• Anticipating failure and learning from operational failures – in order to drive improvement and prepare for the failure’s impact.

As “business as usual” approach doesn’t exist anymore, it’s vital that you design your operations in a way to easily support evolution resulting from customers’ changing habits, or business environment.
 

Security

Thanks to this pillar, your cloud environment is safe and your data, systems and assets stay protected. All thanks to solutions that take advantage of cloud technologies. Security Pillar helps cloud architects develop safe architecture by:

• implementing a strong identity foundation – in order to centralize identity management and introduce identity authorization for each interaction with AWS resources,

• enabling traceability – in order to monitor, alert and audit actions and changes to your environment in real time,

• applying security at all levels – in order to establish multiple security controls,

• automating security best practices – in order to improve your ability to securely scale more rapidly and cost-effectively,

• protecting data in transit and at rest – in order to classify your data into security levels,

• keeping people away from data – in order to eliminate or reduce the need for direct or manual access,

• anticipating security events – in order to seamlessly execute security protocols and investigations policies.

Before your organization implements any kind of security policies and protocols, make sure to consider setting up a well-defined tactics for responding to security incidents. Defining responsibilities will significantly improve dealing with the incident
 

Reliability

This pillar was designed to define the ability of a workload to perform its function correctly and consistently through its total life cycle. There is a number of cloud solutions to help you achieve cloud reliability. A resilient workload quickly recovers from failures to meet business and customer demand. Your AWS partner will maintain it by:

• automatically recovering from failure – in order to automatically notify and track failures, and for automated recovery processes that work around or repair the failure,

• testing recovery procedures – in order to expose failures and recreate failures or simulate them,

• scaling horizontally to increase aggregate workload availability – in order to reduce the impact of one large failure,

• stopping guessing capacity – in order to monitor demand and workload utilization and automate the addition or removal of resources to maintain the optimal level to satisfy demand without over- or under-provisioning,

• managing change in automation – in order to speed them up and mitigate human error.

Before you step into the cloud you need to make sure to meet fundamental requirements such as the right bandwidth in order to accommodate the workload.

Performance Efficiency

It focuses on the efficient use of your IT and computing resources. Thanks to this pillar, your resource types and sizes will be correctly selected based on the workload requirements and you will make an informed decision to maintain efficiency as business needs evolve. Your AWS Partner will let you take advantage of performance efficiency by:

• democratizing advanced technologies – in order to consume technology as a service, delegate complex tasks to your cloud vendor and let your organization use them freely,

• globalizing reach – in order to provide lower latency, deploy your workload in multiple AWS Regions,

• using serverless architecture – in order to remove the need to maintain and pay for the on-premise environment,

• experimenting – in order to make use of different types of instances, storage, or configurations,

• mechanic sympathy – in order to use technology approach that aligns best with your workload goals.

Reviewing your solutions gives you a chance to track any abnormalities in the expected performance and take advantage of the continually evolving AWS Cloud. Remember that optimal configuration for the best performance may vary – that is why Well-Architected certified specialists use different approaches in order to meet your needs.

Cost Optimization

Cost Optimization Pillar helps you avoid unnecessary costs thanks to understanding and controlling where the money is spent, selecting resource types and scaling without overspending. We will keep your cloud cost-efficient by:

• implementing Cloud Financial Management – in order to achieve financial success and accelerate business value through processes and knowledge building,

• adopting a consumption model – in order to pay only for the computing resources you consume and increase or decrease usage depending on business requirements,

• measuring overall efficiency – in order to evaluate the business output of the workload and the costs associated with delivery,

• no longer spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting – in order to remove the operational burden of managing operating systems and applications with managed services as well as racking, stacking or powering servers,

• analyzing and attributing expenditure – in order to measure ROI and give workload owners an opportunity to optimize their resources and reduce costs.

The financial aspect should not define your organizations performance choices. However, AWS specialists will surely design a pay as you go environment to make sure that you don’t overspend on services you don’t use or need.

Sustainability

At re:Invent 2021, Werner Vogels announced that AWS made sustainability the sixth pillar of its Well-Architected Framework. This pillar focuses on minimizing the environmental impact of running cloud workloads.

Similar to its approach to security, AWS is responsible for the sustainability of the cloud, while customers are responsible for sustainability in the cloud. In this model, our cloud architects will help you achieve your sustainability goals by:

• using the minimum amount of hardware - the greenest energy is the energy you don’t use: we will help you build, set up and automate optimal deployments that do their job quickly when needed - and only when needed,

• optimizing software and architecture - we help you build the right architecture that meets your specific business and sustainability needs,

• scaling infrastructure with user load - we show you how to scale resources to eliminate excess capacity and improve efficiency,

• optimizing geographic placement of workloads - we help you choose regions and services that reduce the distance that network traffic must travel to user locations, improving their experience while reducing costs globally,

• eliminating unused assets - remove unused workloads and unneeded data, keeping operational complexity at bay.

If you move to the cloud, you get greener infrastructure. Less resources is less carbon, and AWS’ cloud infrastructure is up to five times more energy-efficient than a typical data center. Adopting a greener approach, with efficiency as a best practice, you can minimize the environmental impacts and save a lot of money on resources.

Is my cloud environment well-architected?

You can find out in no time. Thanks to AWS Well-Architected Tool, Tameshi – a team of certified AWS specialists – will run an audit to determine the state of your workloads and compare them to the latest AWS best practices regarding stable, secure and high-performing application infrastructure.