AWS Well Architected Review
After just over a year on the AWS platform we got an offer from AWS Sydney to perform an Architectural Review of our main workload on the platform. We gratefully accepted the offer determined not to let such an opportunity slip though our fingers. Even with a highly competent DevOps team building the solutions we are aware that we have not had the capacity to apply best practise in all areas yet. Having this independently reviewed would focus our efforts in hardening the configuration.
Our AWS account manager found an internal Solutions Architect to conduct the review, and the review meeting was scheduled to happen in two week’s time. We were not sure what exactly to expect but we had a lot of questions because we are using many very interesting features that AWS offers. Having architected all the solutions based on trial and error and internal team knowledge and vision we were keen to see how we did.
Our vision has always been strong. We want to build a solutions stack that allows us to provide mobile and web solutions to the organisation and our customer at short notice, with high reliability, scalability and performance and using a single source of user management for all applications.
This vision has taken us towards serverless architecture, Hybrid-Mobile Apps and Progressive Web Applications (PWA). Those choices have worked out really well for us, allowing us to autonomously deploy web and mobile applications and their back end solutions with one-click actions and to spend zero time managing or monitoring services to ensure the applications run.
Our development team is highly innovative, taking advantage of AWS features and solutions that not many development teams have the opportunity to work with. Aside from serverless node.js back-ends, managed noSQL databases, React & React Native front end development, serverless user management IdP plus federated Azure AD for staff SSO, centralized logging for all solutions and Continuous Integration triggered by Git branch commits we have also successfully implemented more progressive concepts like AppSync, Amplify and ElasticSearch.
However, the proof is in the platform owner taking a look and passing judgement.
Our nominated Solutions Architect sat us down and started going though his check list. The first few items covered an area that we knew we had not put enough emphasis into. We admitted as much and made sure he fully described the assessment and recommendation in order for us to have a good conversation with management about what we need to do to rate well in that area. So far, so good.
Then we went into the area where we felt we had put our focus and done out best work. And what big smiles we had :D We scored really well and all our architectural choices were deemed well founded and sensibly selected. There were areas of improvement highlighted but we were delighted that none of them caught us off guard. They were all things we had either considered and decided not to use or not had time to mature our approach to.
We completed the review in the allocated 3 hours and were all exhausted after the deep technical dive. The Architect is now producing the final report from the review and we will be taking it to management to determine our next steps.
The Apps Team is very excited about AWS and the services Amazon is providing. We are particularly happy that they are offering reviews like this for free to NGO and NPOs like us and highly encourage anyone in the sector to take them up on the offer. Contact the Amazon Cares team and they will run you through the offerings they have, including the $2.000 of free AWS usage.
