AWS Well Architected Framework

• AWS Well-Architected Framework is white paper created by AWS to build using best practices for AWS services.
• 5 Pillars of AWS Well-Architected Framework:

  1. Operational Excellence
  2. Security
  3. Reliability
  4. Performance Efficiency
  5. Cost Optimization
• Operational Excellence Pillar - Run and monitor system
• Security Pillar - Protect data and system, also mitigate risks.
• Reliability Pillar - Mitigate and recover from disruptions.
• Performance Efficiency Pillar - Use computing resources effectively.
• Cost Optimization Pillar - Get the lowest price.
• AWS proposes to have a type of distributed teams with flexible roles.
• AWS Well-Architected Framework distributed teams should consist of:

  1. Team Experts (to raise the bar how we can do better)
  2. Automated Checks for Standards
  3. Amazon Leadership Principle
• Amazon Leadership Principles are a set of principles used during the company decision-making, problem-solving, simple brainstorming and hiring.
• 16 Traits of Amazon Leadership Principles:

  1. Customer Obsession
  2. Ownership
  3. Invent and Simplify
  4. Try to be Right a lot
  5. Learn and be curious
  6. Hire and Develop the best
  7. Insist on the Highest Standards
  8. Think Big
  9. Bias for Action
  10. Frugality
  11. Earn Trust
  12. Dive Deep
  13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
  14. Deliver Results
  15. Strive to be Earth's Best Employer
  16. Success and scale bring board responsibility.
• General Design Principles:

  1. Stop guessing your capacity needs
  2. Test systems at production scale
  3. Automate to make architectural experimentation easier (using IaC)
  4. Allow for evolutionary architectures (e.g. CI/CD or update releases)
  5. Drive Architectures using data (automatically collect data via Cloud Trail)
  6. Improve through game days (simulate traffic)
• Operational Excellence Design Principle:

  1. Perform operations as code (use IaC)
  2. Make frequent, small, reversible changes (rollbacks, CI/CD)
  3. Refine operations procedures frequently (use game days)
  4. Anticipate failure (you can kill production servers to test recovery)
  5. Learn from all operational failures (share lessons from operational failures)
• Security Design Principles:

  1. Implement a strong identity foundation (use PoLP)
  2. Enable traceability (log metrics)
  3. Apply security at all layers
  4. Automate security best practices
  5. Protect data in transit and at rest
  6. Keep people away from data
  7. Prepare for security events
• Reliability Design Principles:

  1. Automatically recover from failure (monitor KPIs and trigger automation)
  2. Test recovery procedures (test workload fails and validate recovery solution)
  3. Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability
  4. Stop guessing capacity
  5. Manage change in automation (use IaC for formal process)
• Performance Efficiency Design Principles

  1. Democratize advanced technologies. (learn advance tech to optimize cloud services)
  2. Go global in minutes
  3. Use serverless architectures (removes burden to maintain)
  4. Experiment more often (use automation to quickly compare)
  5. Consider mechanical sympathy (understanding how services work before full implementation)
• Cost Optimization Design Principle

  1. Implement cloud financial management (dedicate time to know tools for cost optimization)
  2. Adopt a consumption model (always follow on-demand pricing)
  3. Measure overall efficiency
  4. Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting (AWS does the burden, so focus on customers)
  5. Analyze and attribute expenditure (helps measure ROI)
• AWS Well-Architected Tool is an auditing tool to be used to asset your cloud workloads for alignment with the AWS Well Architected Framework.
• AWS Architecture Center is a web-portal that contains best practices and reference architecture for a variety of different workloads.
• Operational Excellence

  1. The ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures.
  2. There are four best practice areas and tools for operational excellence in the cloud:

  • Organization – AWS Cloud Compliance, AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Organizations
  • Prepare – AWS Config
  • Operate – Amazon CloudWatch
  • Evolve – Amazon Elasticsearch Service
  • AWS CloudFormation for creating templates. (See AWS Management Tools Cheat Sheet)
• Security

  • The ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies.
  • Key AWS service:
  • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Reliability

  • The ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues.
  • There are four best practice areas and tools for reliability in the cloud:
  • Foundations – IAM, Amazon VPC, AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Shield
  • Change Management – AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudWatch
  • Failure Management – AWS CloudFormation, Amazon S3, AWS KMS, Amazon Glacier
  • Workload Architecture –  AWS SDK, AWS Lambda
  • Key AWS service:
  • Amazon CloudWatch
• Performance Efficiency

  • The ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
  • Key AWS service:
  • Amazon CloudWatch
• Cost Optimization

  • The ability to avoid or eliminate unneeded cost or suboptimal resources.
  • Key AWS service:
  • Cost Explorer
• Sustainability

  • The ability to increase efficiency across all components of a workload by maximizing the benefits from the provisioned resources.
  • There are six best practice areas for sustainability in the cloud:
  • Region Selection – AWS Global Infrastructure
  • User Behavior Patterns – Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing
  • Software and Architecture Patterns – AWS Design Principles
  • Data Patterns – Amazon EBS,  Amazon EFS, Amazon FSx, Amazon S3
  • Hardware Patterns – Amazon EC2, AWS Elastic Beanstalk
  • Development and Deployment Process – AWS CloudFormation
  • Key AWS service:
  • Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling