AWS Well-Architected Framework
Hello, I hope that this article finds you well in your learning journey. In this short article I will discuss the Well-Architected Framework in the cloud. It is important to to understand the importance of a solid design framework in the cloud. The cloud is allows you to be agile and and focus on providing services to meet a business need rather than focusing on the underlying infrastructure. This is one of the major contributors to the wide adoption the cloud. “Using the Framework helps you learn architectural best practices for designing and operating secure, reliable, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable workloads in the AWS Cloud.” (Well-Architected Framework, 2023)
The 6 pillars outlines architectural best practices for designing workloads that run in the cloud. If you are planning on working in the cloud or studying for the AWS certificate this short explanation will come in handy! AWS provides a great learning resources such as whitepapers. I want to break these 6 pillars so that they are easy to understand.
6 Pillars of Well-Architected Framework
- Operational Excellence
- Security
- Reliability
- Performance Efficiency
- Cost Optimization
- Sustainability
Operational Excellence
The goal of operational excellence is to get new features and bug fixes into customers’ hands quickly and reliably. The software within the workloads need to be built correctly while consistently delivering a great customer experience. The pillar focuses on operating correctly and reliably. There are design principles and best practices to achieve operational excellence.
Design Principles:
These design principles are pretty strait forward so I won’t go into more detail. You can find out more here.
- Perform operations as code
- Make frequent, small, reversible changes
- Refine operations procedures frequently
- Anticipate failure
- Learn from all operational failures
Best Practices:
- Organization: Understand the organization’s priorities, organizational structure, and how the organization supports the team members.
- Prepare: Have to understand the workloads and their expected behaviors. You will then be able to design them to provide insight to their status and build the procedures to support them.
- Operate: By understanding the health of the workload and operations, you can identify when organizational and business outcomes may become at risk, or are at risk, and respond appropriately.
- Evolve: Implement frequent small incremental changes based on the lessons learned from your operations activities and evaluate the improvement.
To learn more about the the pillar look at the whitepaper.
Whitepaper: Operational excellence
Security
Describes how to take advantage of cloud technologies to protect data, systems, and assets to improve the security posture. This topic is dense and requires in-depth knowledge into the internal works of AWS. I will highlight a few topics that are important to understand. It is worth noting that there are entire careers that revolve around securing the workloads. This is my particular field of interest and plan on writing more articles on this topic.
Cloud Responsibility Model
This outlines the responsibilities of the cloud provider, in case it is AWS and responsibilities of the customer. It is worth noting that there are grey areas within this model and it is difficult for customers. Here is a use-case looking at a data breach that demonstrates the cloud responsibility model.
AWS Responsibility— Responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs all of the services offered in the AWS Cloud. This infrastructure is composed of the hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run AWS Cloud services.
Customer Responsibility — Customer responsibility will be determined by the AWS Cloud services that a customer selects. This determines the amount of configuration work the customer must perform as part of their security responsibilities.
AWS Account Management
Organize workloads in separate accounts and group accounts based on function, compliance requirements.
Operating your workloads securely
Operating workloads securely covers the whole lifecycle of a workload from design, to build, to run, and to ongoing improvement.
Identity and access management
Must grant your users and applications access to resources in your AWS accounts.
Detection
Detection consists of two parts: detection of unexpected or unwanted configuration changes, and the detection of unexpected behavior.
There are other topics that fall under this pillar such as data protection, application security, infrastructure protection, and incident response. There is enough information to study all of these topics independently.
To learn more about the the pillar look at the whitepaper.
Whitepaper: Security
Reliability
Encompasses the ability of a workload to perform its intended function correctly and consistently when it’s expected to.
Design Principles
Automatically recover from failure: By monitoring a workload for key performance indicators (KPIs), you can start automation when a threshold is breached.
Test recovery procedures: In an on-premises environment, testing is often conducted to prove that the workload works in a particular scenario.
Scale horizontally to increase aggregate workload availability: Replace one large resource with multiple small resources to reduce the impact of a single failure on the overall workload.
Stop guessing capacity: A common cause of failure in on-premises workloads is resource saturation, when the demands placed on a workload exceed the capacity of that workload such as DoS attack.
Manage change in automation: Changes to your infrastructure should be made using automation. The changes that must be managed, tracked and reviewed.
Best Practices
Foundations: Before architecting any system, foundational requirements that influence reliability should be in place.
Workload architecture: A reliable workload starts with upfront design decisions for both software and infrastructure.
Change management: Changes to the workload or environment must be anticipated and accommodated to achieve reliable operation of the workload.
Failure management: Requires that the workload is aware of failures as they occur and take action to avoid impact on availability.
To learn more about the the pillar look at the whitepaper.
Whitepaper: Reliability
Performance Efficiency
Focuses on the efficient use of computing resources to meet requirements, and how to maintain efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
Design Principles
Democratize advanced technologies: Make advanced technology implementation smoother for your team by delegating complex tasks to your cloud vendor.
Go global in minutes: Deploying your workload in multiple AWS Regions around the world permits you to provide lower latency and a better experience for your customers at minimal cost.
Use serverless architectures: Serverless architectures remove the need for you to run and maintain physical servers for traditional compute activities.
Experiment more often: Can quickly carry out comparative testing using different types of instances, storage, or configurations.
Consider mechanical sympathy: Understand how cloud services are consumed and always use the technology approach that aligns with your workload goals.
Best Practices
Selection: Choose the correction components of the workload such as compution and storage.
Review: Must verify that workload components are using the latest technologies and approaches to continually improve performance.
Monitoring: Must monitor its performance so that you can remediate any issues before they impact your customers.
Tradeoffs: Depending on your situation, you could trade consistency, durability, and space for time or latency, to deliver higher performance.
To learn more about the the pillar look at the whitepaper.
Whitepaper: Performance Efficiency
Cost Optimization
Help build and operate cost-aware workloads that achieve business outcomes while minimizing costs and allowing your organization to maximize its return on investment.
Design principles
Implement Cloud Financial Management: To achieve financial success and accelerate business value realization in the cloud.
Adopt a consumption model: Pay only for the computing resources that you require and increase or decrease usage depending on business requirements.
Measure overall efficiency: Measure the business output of the workload and the costs associated with delivering it.
Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting: AWS does the heavy lifting of data center operations like racking, stacking, and powering servers.
Analyze and attribute expenditure: The cloud makes it simple to accurately identify the usage and cost of systems. Permits transparent attribution of IT costs to individual workload owners.
Best Practices
Practice Cloud Financial Management: Builds capability across your organization by implementing organizational wide knowledge building, programs, resources, and processes.
Expenditure and usage awareness: Understanding the organization’s costs and drivers is critical for managing your cost and usage effectively, and identifying cost-reduction opportunities.
Cost effective resources: Using the appropriate services, resources, and configurations for your workloads is key to cost savings.
Manage demand and supply resources: Supply resources to match the workload demand at the time they’re needed. This eliminates the need for costly and wasteful over-provisioning.
Optimize over time: Optimize over time by reviewing new services and implementing them in your workload.
To learn more about the the pillar look at the whitepaper.
Whitepaper: Cost Optimization
Sustainability
The discipline of sustainability addresses the long-term environmental, economic, and societal impact of your business activities.
There are a variety of best practices and improvements processes to help reduce the greenhouse gasses and energy consumed by workloads in the cloud. Automation and monitoring aids in examining trends and reach organizational goals. AWS is setting goals to make the data centers green by using renewable energy and reduce water being used to cool the data centers.
To learn more about the the pillar look at the whitepaper.
Whitepaper: Sustainability
Conclusion
AWS Well-Architected Framework aid in the design and deployment of architectural sound workloads based upon best practices for designing and operating secure, reliable, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable workloads in the AWS Cloud. The short article covered the framework at a high-level and I hope that it aids your learning.
Resources:
Well-Architected Framework. (April, 2023). Amazon Web Services. Retrieved May 2, 2023, from https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework/welcome.html
