AWS Well-Architected FrameworkA Comprehensive Guide To Perform An AWS Well-Architected Review — Part 1
In today’s dynamic technological landscape, ensuring that cloud architecture aligns with best practices is crucial for business success. The AWS Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) offers a structured approach to evaluate and optimize cloud workloads against industry standards.
WAFR might be a big-time commitment, depending on multiple factors such as the team experience, the workload complexity etc. That being said, being aware of these best practices is key to ensuring the time your team is investing in the review will result in the expected outcome of identifying architecture risks and addressing them. Let us take a good look at the nitty-gritty of Well-Architected Framework Reviews and explore its first phase in detail.
Overview of an AWS Well-Architected Review
There are practices and codes to follow when building a product to ensure it is aligned with industry standards. However, to build a whole technology system, simply having practices in place is not enough. You also need to implement mechanisms to ensure that your teams are aware of these practices, and they are following them.
AWS Well Architected Framework Review is the consistent process of learning AWS best practices, measuring architecture against these best practices, identifying architecture risks and creating an improvement plan to address them. AWS Well-Architected helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for a variety of applications and workloads. There are proven design principles if customers follow, it’s likely the systems they build will deliver its functionality as expected. These design principles and best practices are the core part of the AWS Well-Architected Framework and they span six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization and Sustainability.
Goals of an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review
The ultimate goal of WAFR is to improve the architectures of your systems so that these systems can better support business needs. The architecture improvement process starts by reviewing the current architecture and comparing it against best practices by answering a set of questions for each pillar.
The questions validate whether a specific best practice is implemented in your architecture or not. Based on your answers, and with the help of the AWS Well-Architected Tool (AWS WA Tool), areas are targeted in the architecture that represent high, medium or low risks. The next step is to start working on resolving the risks on a priority-based approach by identifying the highest impact of these risks. Then an improvement plan is created to address them.
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Preparation — the First Phase of a WAFR
In total, there are three phases for WAFR, of which the first phase is called the ‘Preparation phase’. This preparation for a WAFR, on average, starts about 3 weeks before the actual review date. It depends on factors like time to assemble the review team, how many pillars to review, or the priority given to complete the review by the organization. Let us see how this phase is carried out step-by-step: -
Step 1- Define a workload
The first step to prepare for an AWS WAFR is to identify the workload you want to review. A workload is a set of components (technology, people, processes) that delivers a business value to your organization. It’s the level of business and technology that leaders communicate about.
Step 2- Define core team (sponsors)
After identifying a workload to review, you need to identify its owners, often referred to as sponsors. A workload sponsor is a person (or team) who is ultimately responsible for the success (or failure) of the workload. You also need to identify a sponsor for each pillar. Depending on your organization’s structure and size, you may have one person responsible for multiple pillars, or multiple teams responsible for one pillar, or a mix of both. The goal here is to ensure that you have the right person to answer the review questions for each pillar, and later, to address any risks identified on that pillar as part of the treatment plan.
Step 3- Decide on the pillars and lenses
It’s most ideal to get a detailed look at the workload from the six pillars perspective. It’s also recommended that you follow the pillars order as they are listed in the Well-Architected Framework. However, there may be situations where you may need to focus only on specific pillars. Hence, you may decide the order and choice of pillars to conduct the WAFR on as per your organization’s priority.
Step 4- Decide on session’s type
Depending on selected pillars and teams’ availability, you need to decide on the review’s session format. Options include a full one day for six pillars, or several sessions in several days for selected pillars. Having a full day review is usually harder to schedule but it’s the most valuable because all stakeholders get together to discuss best practices.
Usually, this format helps uncover improvement opportunities the most. Having several sessions is a good option if you have geographically distributed teams, or larger teams, and it’s hard to bring them together at the same time. This approach is easier to maintain, but it may require you to do a little extra work to update different teams on different milestones.
Step 5- Collect the necessary data for the review
Before conducting the review session, it’s recommended that you collect details about the workload you’re reviewing. For example, check any architecture diagrams or documents that explain the main components of the system, its back-end, and the main processes and teams responsible for operating it.
Team Up With Cloud Wizard To Amp Up Your Cloud Infrastructure With AWS Well-Architected Framework
The AWS Well-Architected Framework is essential for businesses to revitalize their operations and aim for an all-round optimal performance. Getting in touch with a Select Tier Services Partner like Cloud Wizard can be of great assistance in helping you get an AWS Well-Architected Review to thoroughly analyze and troubleshoot your cloud infrastructure. Get valuable guidance on the areas where your cloud practices could improve for better efficiency and workflow while being environmentally sustainable at the same time.
Earn $5,000 in AWS service credits per workload if you implement the review recommendations!
Want to make sure your cloud infrastructure is up to the mark? Get an AWS Well-Architected Review right away!
