Are You Well-Architected?

A Look at A Robust AWS Architecture

The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides guidelines on what makes an optimal
cloud infrastructure.

In an age that is exploding with Big Data and IoT innovations, the shift from an
"on-premise" environment to a "cloud" environment offers tremendous opportunity for
organizations in terms of increased agility, lower total cost of ownership and
faster innovation. The organizations that are the most successful in making this
major shift are those that start early in their journey to establish a well-defined
strategy for approaching this new IT operating model.

Moving from a large-investment model in data centers to the consumption-based model

of AWS requires not only certain changes to tools and processes but also the
organizations� mindsets as well. Today, almost 52% of organizations around the
world are using some form of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and 65% of the
organizations as Information-as-a-Service (IaaS).

Collectively, if we see the PaaS/IaaS usage worldwide, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
leads the pack with 94% of all-access events. More than 50% of the organizations
are also using AWS with Azure, typically as an official multi-cloud strategy.

In this context, AWS�s well-architected (WA) program is a framework to measure

applications running in the cloud against a set of strategies and best practices.
The framework has been compiled by working closely with over thousands of customers
for over ten years.

The purpose of this framework is to empower customers to make informed decisions

about their cloud architecture and help them to understand the potential impact
that those decisions can have. The questions that arise while one goes through the
well-architected process is based on the business context in terms of the business
realities and the choices that are made for a given system at a given time rather
than a simple �Yes or No.�

The AWS WA Framework consists of a set of questions that span across five pillars
based on cloud-specific design principles. Creating technology solutions is a lot
like constructing a building. If the foundation (read as "pillar") of the building
isn�t solid then it may compromise the integrity and function of that building or
cause structural problems to it, both of which are detrimental to the business. A
set of design principles are implemented to facilitate a good design in the cloud
which are divided into two categories � General and Pillar Specific.General and
Pillar Specific

Amazon Web Services (AWS) WA Framework serves 3 benefits for its customers. First,
it increases the awareness of the architectural best practices and helps them
understand the pros and cons of the decisions they make while building systems on
AWS. Secondly, it addresses foundational areas that are often neglected while
designing out the cloud system. Thirdly, it teaches a consistent approach to
evaluate architectures and making corrections or improvements wherever needed. If
implemented well, well-architected systems can increase success and provide a
competitive advantage to the business to a great extent.

The 5 Pillars Of The AWS Framework

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is an amalgamation of architectural best
practices that empowers the customers to develop workloads that are secure, cost-
optimized, reliable and high-performing in nature. Each pillar of the framework is
supported by certain design principles, which, if used wisely, can help strengthen
the pillars even further and ensure the sound working of the entire cloud system.

With the context of cloud architecture, a workload can be defined as a set of

components that constantly delivers business value and is indicative of the level
of detail that the technology and business leaders often communicate about such as
analytic platforms, marketing websites and so on. What makes the study of cloud
architecture so significant is that the workloads which these systems manage
usually vary in their level of architectural complexity in the sense that some can
be simple (static website) or complex (microservices architectures with many linked
components and multiple data stores).5 PILLARS OF THE AWS FRAMEWORK

Security
It deals with protecting information, assets, and systems against advanced threats
through continued risk assessments and mitigation strategies.

To strengthen this pillar, it is essential to implement a strong identity

foundation by centralizing privilege management and reducing reliance on long-term
credentials; apply security at all layers by applying a defense-in-depth approach
with other security controls; protect data in transit and at rest by classifying
your data into sensitivity and using mechanism of encryption and access control
wherever appropriate; automate security best practices to scale up more rapidly by
implementing controls in a secure architecture that are automatically designed and
managed as a code in version-controlled templates; enable traceability by
constantly monitoring and auditing actions and changes in the architecture in real-
time and integrating metrics and logs within the system to automatically respond
and take action; preparing for major security events by having an appropriate
incident management process in place aligning to your specific organizational
requirements; create tools and mechanisms that reduce or eliminate the need for
manual processing or direct access to data by humans to avoid unnecessary loss or
errors while handling sensitive data.

Reliability
Reliability deals with meeting the customer and business demands by proactively
preventing and quickly recovering from failures � misconfigurations or transient
network issues � arising out of the foundational elements through proven failure
recovery processes, consistent change management and the acquisition of computing
resources. In a traditional on-premise environment, achieving reliability can be
quite difficult due to single-point of failure, and the lack of elasticity and
automation to mitigate disruptions.

To strengthen this pillar, it is necessary to test and validate recovery procedures

by using automation to simulate various failures or recreate pre-failure scenarios
to expose failure pathways and fix it before a real failure scenario takes place;
scale horizontally to increase the aggregate system availability by replacing one
large resource with multiple small resources to reduce the single failure�s impact
on the overall system, and distributing requests across the smaller resources to
reduce the chance of overall system failure; automatically recover from failure by
monitoring the system for key performance indicators (measure of business value
rather than the technical aspect of the service operation) and triggering
automation when a threshold is breached; manage change in infrastructure via
automation to reduce errors or breakdowns; stop guessing capacity by monitoring the
demand and system utilization, and automating the addition or removal of resources
to maintain an optimal level to satisfy demand without over-provisioning or under-
provisioning as the most common cause of failure in on-premises systems is resource
saturation.

Performance Efficiency
The pillar involves using computing resources effectively and efficiently to meet
the demand requirements and maintaining that efficiency level as the demand changes
in response to technological evolution. Achieving high-level and lasting
performance can be challenging in a traditional, on-premises environment.

To strengthen this pillar, it is necessary to mechanical sympathy by using the

technology approach that aligns best with what you are trying to achieve;
democratize advanced technologies by pushing the knowledge and complexity of these
advanced technologies into the cloud vendor�s domain, and simply letting your IT
team consume it in the form of a service such as machine learning, media
transcoding and NoSQL databases; experiment more often using virtual and automated
resources that can help to quickly carry out comparative testing using different
types of configurations and instances; use serverless architectures in the cloud by
removing the operational burden of running and managing these servers by using
storage servers which drastically reduces the transactional costs to carry out
computing activities; go global in minutes by easily deploying the cloud system in
multiple regions around the world in a few clicks to give a better experience to
the customers at minimal cost and to provide lower latency.

Performance efficiency in the cloud is composed of four areas:

Performance-efficiency-in-the-cloud-is-composed-of-four-areas

Operational Excellence
This deals with running and monitoring systems to deliver business value and
continually improve procedures and processes to enhance operational capabilities.
In traditional on-premises environments, operations is perceived as an isolated
function and distinct from the lines of the development and business teams that it
supports.

To strengthen this pillar, it is necessary to learn from all the operational

failures by driving continuous improvement through lessons learned from all
operational events and sharing what is learned across all teams and through the
entire organization; make frequent and reversible changes by designing workloads in
a way to allow components to be updated regularly in order to increase the flow of
beneficial changes into your workload.

Changes in small increments can be reversed if they fail to help in the resolution
of issues introduced to your environment; perform operations as code by defining
and updating the workload as a code, and scripting operations procedures and
automating their execution by triggering them in response to events; refine
operations and procedures frequently by setting up regular game days to review and
validate that all the operations and procedures are effective; maintain annotated
documentation by automating the creation of annotated documentation after every
build which can further be used by humans and systems as a further input to the
operations code; anticipate failure by performing exercises in a simulated
environment to identify potential sources of failure so that they can be mitigated.

Operational excellence in the cloud is composed of three areas:operational-

excellence

In order to achieve leading results in the industry, an organization must have a

sound strategy to which its operational capabilities align, and that it must be
able to execute its strategy more reliably and consistently than its competitors �
this is what defines Operational Excellence. Being operationally excellent allows
companies to have lower operating costs, lower operational risk and increased
revenues in comparison to its competitors, thereby enabling the organization to
create value for its customers and shareholders. Operational Excellence cannot be
directly measured but can be easily viewed in the seven performance metrics or the
seven value drivers measuring compliance, quality, yield, cost, safety,
environmental and productivity.Operational Excellence

Cost Optimization
It deals with avoiding unneeded costs and ensuring that the value received from the
implementation of the best practices is always more than the costs incurred to
implement it. Cost optimization can be challenging in traditional on-premises
solutions because one has to predict the business needs and future capacity while
navigating through complex procurement processes to ensure that the usage and costs
move in line with the demand and that the costs get reduced over time by using
appropriate resources to deliver the required business outcomes and maximize its
return on investment.

To strengthen this pillar, it is necessary to measure overall efficiency which

helps to understand the gains one can make from increasing the output and reducing
the cost. AWS can do the heavy lifting of racking, stacking, and powering servers
so that one can focus on the business projects and customers rather than on the IT
infrastructure; use managed services on the cloud to reduce cost of ownership by
removing the operational burden of maintaining servers for tasks such as managing
databases and sending emails; analyze and attribute expenditure by making it easier
to accurately identify the cost and usage of systems on the cloud and measure
return on investment (ROI), presenting the system owners with an opportunity to
optimize their resources and reduce costs, adopt a consumption model by paying only
for the computing resources one consumes and changing the usage accordingly
depending on the business requirements.

Cost optimization in the cloud is composed of four areas:

cost-optimization

The Benefits of Shifting to a Cloud Computing Environment

As organizations continue to cope with the increasing complexity in business
operations and disruption in the way they work owing to advanced technologies, they
have to find newer ways to manage their operations to keep pace with the times and
derive maximum value out of it for all of its stakeholders.

In a cloud computing environment, advanced IT resources are only a click away and
it provides several benefits over a traditional computing environment. Cloud
computing represents a significant shift in how technology is obtained, used and
managed. It also represents a shift in how organizations plan the IT budget and pay
for technology services. Cloud computing enables organizations to gain advantage
from massive economies of scale, increase business agility and flexibility, trade
capital expense for variable expense, go global in minutes, and avoid spending
extra money running and maintaining data centers.

However, cloud adoption requires that the fundamental changes in the cloud
architecture are discussed and considered across the entire organization and that
the stakeholders across all the organizational unit (both within and outside IT)
are informed about these changes and support these changes. Once the cloud
architecture is sound, it can enable teams to implement continuous integration and
delivery practices across all development stages. In other words, teams can quickly
compare and evaluate practices and architectures against the set benchmarks
(microservices and serverless) to determine what solution best fits the enterprise
needs.

As more companies shift their strategic focus to building a top-notch customer

experience, competitive benchmarking becomes all the more necessary to stay one
step ahead in the industry landscape.
Enterprise architecture guides your organization�s information, process, business
and technology decisions which allows it to execute its business strategy and meet
the constantly-evolving customer needs. There are typically four domains of
enterprise architecture:Four domains of enterprise architecture

The Internet of Things (IoT) is providing the organization with an ability to

derive insights into the context that was previously invisible to the business.
However, the organization needs a platform that meets the foundational principles
of an IoT solution, before it can develop a strategy for IoT. AWS WA platform is
providing organizations with the basic freedom to derive economic and
organizational benefits of the cloud into their businesses and support virtually
any cloud workload.