The Six Pillars of AWS Well-Architected Framework

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand the shortcomings of your workloads on AWS. By using the Well-Architected Framework, you will get a picture of the current architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective workloads in the cloud. It gives a way for you to consistently evaluate your workloads against best practices and identify areas for improvement.

AWS Well-Architected Framework is based on the six pillars mentioned below:

1. Operation Excellence
2. Security
3. Reliability
4. Performance Efficiency
5. Cost Optimisation
6. Sustainability

Let’s quickly walk through each pillar.

Operation Excellence: The operational excellence pillar consists of how organisations maintain business objectives, the ability to run workloads efficiently, gain insight into their operations, and continuously improve processes and procedures to deliver business needs.

It mainly focuses on the below four areas:

• Organise
• Prepare
• Operate
• Evolve

The company’s leadership will define the business objectives. They must first understand the business requirements before starting the workload and prepare certain processes and apply them while delivering the business workloads. You can implement certain services for enabling the integration, deployments and create an automated process for any repeated tasks. You must respond to the incidents and prepare a strategy for daily operations. It is always a good practice to make small changes and deploy them and later test your workloads before moving to production.

Security: Security pillar focuses mainly on protecting the data, system, assets while delivering the business objectives through risk assessments & mitigation approaches. You may need to apply a zero-trust approach wherever necessary by restricting the permissions.

The main objective of this pillar is focused on applying security best practices in the below areas:

• Identity & Access management
• Data Protection
• Infrastructure Protection
• Threat Detection
• Incident Response

Always provide only required permissions to the IAM users and systems. Use automated tools while working or processing data so that it will reduce the risk of modifying sensitive data. Use AWS Key Management Services for protecting your data at REST and Transit. You have to apply security best practices at all the application layers by choosing the respective AWS services wherever required. Trace your application by setting up monitoring and events in real-time. Always capture the application and VPC flow logs using a centralised logging system and use them to investigate and take action.

Reliability: Reliability pillar provides support for best practices in the design, delivery, and maintenance of your AWS workloads. It helps the system recover from service disruption and spin the compute resources dynamically to meet the business demands.

This pillar mainly focuses on the below areas:

• Workload Architecture
• Change Management
• Failure Management

Make sure to understand the service limits and accordingly design the workloads. You must build workloads that are highly scalable and reliable. A scalable workload provides elasticity so that the resources can be added or removed based upon the business needs and current demand at any given point in time. Always backup your application data keeping the RTO and RPO which meet your application requirements. Having backups and redundant workload elements in place is the plan for your DR strategy. Implement the changes to your application by using the CI/CD tools and plan for functional tests before moving the workload to the production environments.

Performance Efficiency: This pillar focuses on maintaining computing resources efficiently when the demand changes and the technology advances. Always try to deploy your workloads on multiple availability zones to take complete advantage of cloud capabilities.

This pillar mainly focuses on the below areas:

• Selection
• Review
• Monitoring
• Trade-offs

Depending on the workload you deploy on AWS cloud you may need to select the type of architecture which will best fit your application. We may combine multiple selections like storage, database, network, and performance-related architectures and incorporate them into your workload to improve its performance. You can always stay up to date with the latest services of AWS and try to implement them in your workloads and increase the performance and efficiency of your workloads. Try to set up the monitoring and logging of workloads and timely visualise them to explore the areas where your workload needs to be improvised and work on enhancing those modules to get the best performance out of your workload. While designing the solution you can consider trade-offs that enables the best approach. Often you can enhance performance by trading stability, durability, and space for time and latency like using CDN & ElastiCache services in your workloads.

Cost Optimisation: This pillar focuses on avoiding unnecessary costs on your AWS resources. Pay only for the resources which your workload requires. Integrate Cloud Financial Management tools like Cost Explorer, Budgets, Cost & Usage Reports, etc. Implement pricing models for your workloads like Reserved instances for regularly running workloads and Spot instances for short-term workloads.

This pillar mainly focuses on the below areas:

• Cloud Financial Management
• Cost & Usage Awareness
• Cost-effective Resources
• Manage Demand & Supply Resources

You should always partner with Finance & Technology stakeholders to create a shared understanding of organisational goals and develop mechanisms to succeed financially in the variable spend model of cloud computing. Monitor cost and usage proactively within your organisation. Discuss with your teams on cost and usage since there could be multiple workloads run by different teams. All teams in the organisation might have their own revenue streams.

Sustainability: This pillar focuses on understanding the impact of services used, measuring impact through the entire workload lifecycle, and applying design principles and best practices to reduce these. The customer is responsible for sustainability in the cloud, like data usage and design, application design, cost optimisation, scaling, and deployments. AWS is responsible for the sustainability of the cloud, like Servers, Cooling, Water, Data Centres, Electricity Supply, etc.

So, in order to run your production environment workloads efficiently, all the above pillars are critical to ensure a fast and reliable workload with minimal cost and secure environments.

Want Your Own Well-Architected Review?

As an AWS Well-Architected Partner, Ankercloud is able to perform Well-Architect Reviews of your AWS-based systems and applications. Get in touch with us at info@ankercloud to see how we can help you out.