Pro Bono AWS Architecture Reviews

Helping those building tech solutions that help during the pandemic

Cloud Pegboard is running free cloud architecture reviews for anyone developing an AWS-based solution related to the pandemic. The program is for independent consultants/freelancers, startups, and smaller teams/organizations who otherwise don’t have a chance to get the value of a review.

If you are interested in getting an architecture reviewed or contributing as a reviewer, please send us a note via our Contact Us page.

Thanks for making the world better,
Ken Robbins
Founder/CEO, CloudPegboard.com

Why is Cloud Pegboard doing this?

We are in an unprecedented time that has resulted in a great number of efforts by development teams and individuals across the world to contribute in their own ways to addressing the myriad needs brought about by the global pandemic. Technology is being applied to aid in developing treatments, to manage data, to improve logistics, to connect and engage isolated people, to support people that have lost their income sources, and many other categories.

We want to help the builders creating these solutions to reach their goals faster and more effectively as our way to contribute and hopefully make an impact.

An effective architecture review, especially early in a project’s lifecycle can make a substantial difference in the project’s success along various dimensions of time, quality, and effectiveness. However, many individuals and teams don’t have access to an internal peer group (or an AWS Enterprise Support Contract which includes architecture reviews) to provide effective architecture reviews. Therefore, we created the Community Architecture Review (CAR) program to fill this gap and accelerate solutions to improve the state of the world.

Who can get reviewed?

Anyone who is developing a solution that will somehow help some element of society is eligible. This includes non-profit and commercial ventures, individuals and teams, AWS novices and experts.

Our definition is intended to be extremely broad. For example, a developer who was laid off due to the pandemic and is creating a commercial solution as a source of income, is a valid use case for “helping some element of society.”

Will all applicants get a review?

Our goal is to provide/facilitate reviews for anyone who has an eligible use case. This is a new program and honestly, we don’t know what the demand will be like. We hope that we have the success problem of too high demand — we’ll figure it out!

We will use our best judgement to prioritize requests to match our available capacity of volunteer reviewers. In general we will favor the following attributes:

• Unemployed due to the pandemic
• Individuals and small teams who do not have alternative means in their organizations to get reviewed
• Projects that are earlier in their lifecycle (more impact potential early on)
• Qualitative impact for the solution. Note that sometimes scale can be a factor, but serving a very small niche group is also important and will be also strongly considered (if someone is going to address an underserved need, we want to help them too)
• Less AWS experience

Who are the reviewers?

The reviewers are cloud community volunteers from a broad variety of circumstances, domains, and experiences. Ken Robbins, Founder/CEO of Cloud Pegboard will participate in as many reviews as possible depending on demand.

Reviewers are drawn from AWS users (with and without formal certifications) who may be employed in various industries, individual contractors/freelancers, AWS Heroes, AWS employees, and engineers from cloud vendors.

Each review will have multiple reviewers to provide diverse perspectives. We will do our best to match the expertise of reviewers with the needs of each review.

Is it really free?

Yes. If you are doing something positive for one or many people, we want to help.

Why get a review?

Identifying and correcting architecture and service/tool choice issues in a solution can have an extreme downstream magnification of the effects (often orders of magnitude). The earlier issues can be identified, the greater the leverage of the benefit. At the same time, it’s difficult to review your own work because of the inherent challenges in seeing flaws in your own work, and since no individual can have the different perspectives, knowledge, and experience that others might bring to the table.

Having your solution reviewed in this program provides the following specific benefits:

• Reduce risk of issues with scaling, performance, security, cost, compliance, cost, maintainability, flexibility, reliability, etc. Ultimately, properly managing these qualities are required for solution success.
• Learn from others in the context of your own solution
• Meet and engage with others in the community and build your connections
• Improve your customer or employer satisfaction by delivering a superior solution

Why be a reviewer?

Being a reviewer on one or more reviews is a way that you can contribute to helping make the world just a little bit better by supporting a person or team who are themselves striving to do good.

Some of the benefits of being a reviewer include:

• Opportunity to give back and mentor for something that matters
• You will learn by teaching and being exposed to new problem and solution approaches
• Especially in this time of isolation, it’s nice to meet others in the community and build your network
• Chance to exercise your own critical analysis and review skills
• You’ll have the ability to briefly describe your personal qualifications (which may help if you are a freelancer or job seeker) or company’s product as part of the introductions and in the project artifacts collection.
• Priority to be reviewed yourself. If you’ve been a reviewer and need a review, that will help prioritize your review request

What preparation is required?

We think that architecture reviews should have low friction and low overhead so that they actually get done. It’s also important to make the most of the valuable time a reviewee has with the review team. Therefore, we do ask a reviewee to complete a form (the “review packet”) that collects answers to a common set of questions so that we can assess the request, match the right review team, and provide answers to the common questions to reviewers in advance to make the live meeting more efficient. The review packet includes at least one architecture diagram. The diagram should be functional to facilitate understanding — it need not be pretty (i.e., don’t obsess over making it a work or art — good enough is good enough).

What will the review cover?

The content of a review will depend on the solution itself and the concerns of the reviewee. It is not possible to cover all dimensions (pillars in AWS Well-Architected Framework lingo) or even all aspects of one or a few dimensions in a single review. Therefore, we will focus primarily on areas of concern raised by the reviewee as well as high priority areas identified by reviewers.

We divide reviews into three classes based on when they occur during a project’s life cycle. These classes are : early, mid, late.

Early reviews are often characterized by the macro architecture and the choice of services and tools. We think that these are the most high-valued reviews since a small input at this level may be dramatically magnified in the resulting solution.

Mid-project reviews tend to be closer to the implementation details and function as a checkpoint to provide course correction if needed

Late reviews are largely about catching misses especially with respect to security or operational excellence.

How is the review conducted?

The review is a live video meeting with screen sharing as necessary. Depending on the solution being reviewed, there will typically be one to three reviewers and it will last one hour. For special situations it’s possible that there will be more reviewers and/or more time (or sessions) allocated.

All participants will be invited to a Slack workspace that will exist before and after the actual review. This will allow for Slack follow up conversations if appropriate. However, note that reviewers will not be obligated to remain in the Slack workspace or respond to follow up questions.

We may consider offline reviews in the future, but for now we think that the live format is more effective, more likely to get engagement, and provides a number of secondary benefits by being a social activity with actual human interaction and connections.

There will be specific guidance provided (a separate document) to provide the specific agenda and meeting flow details.

Are there any Intellectual Property protections?

You should only participate if the information that you share can be made public. If necessary, you can of course black box or abstract modules of the architecture, but you should only participate if you can share enough information publicly to have an effective review. There will be no IP protections or Non-Disclosure Agreements of any kind.

Can you describe the “feel” of the review?

These reviews should be supportive, invigorating, non-judgemental, and honest affairs. Each reviewer’s goal is to help the reviewee be more successful and to imagine themselves in the reviewees shoes. During a review, all participants are teammates working for a greater good. Think of the best teacher your or your kids have ever had — that’s that the model we want for our reviewers. Reviewee should leave a review energized and thankful for the experience. Reviewers should leave a review feeling pride that they helped someone and in turn helped their social mission.

We hope that a side effect is that participants occasionally make new friends or otherwise build their networks. A review should be fun and all participants should want to do it again.

Is there a Code of Conduct?

A code of conduct will be codified in a separate document. The summary is that everyone is expected to be good humans to each other and no discrimination of any sort will be tolerated.

What is the privacy policy?

We will not share any participants’ email addresses with other participants or with anyone outside of Cloud Pegboard. All interactions between participants will be via the live meeting or in Slack. Participants may choose to share their personal information via Slack (in a channel or via a direct message) at their sole discretion.

What else should I know?

Like everyone else adapting and creating new capabilities in response to the pandemic, we are building and evolving this program dynamically. We will continue to adapt and improve as we gain experience and feedback. If you have any questions or ideas for improvement, we’re all about feedback, so please do not hesitate to contact us via email (or Slack once you’ve been added).

About Cloud Pegboard

Cloud Pegboard helps AWS practitioners be highly effective and efficient even in the face of the tremendous complexity and rate of change of AWS services. We want to keep AWS fun and feel more like dancing in a sprinkler on a hot summer day and less like being blasted with a firehose. We make the AWS information you need amazingly easy to access, and with personalization features, we help you stay up to date on the AWS services and capabilities that are important to you and your specific projects.

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