AWS - 5 Pillars of Well Architected Framework

by Rahul Gupta

Operational Excellence

— Includes the ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and continually improve supporting processes and procedures

— Design Principles

  • Perform operations as code - Infrastructure as code
  • Annotate documentation - Automate the creation of annotated documentation after every build
  • Make frequent, small, reversible changes
  • Refine operations procedure frequently - and ensure team members are familiar with it
  • Anticipate failure
  • Learn from all operational failures

Security

— Includes the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies

— Design Principles

  • Implement a strong identity foundation - Centralize privilege management and reduce (or even eliminate) reliance on long-term credentials - Principle of least privilege - IAM
  • Enable traceability - Integrate logs and metrics with systems to automatically respond and take action
  • Apply security at all layers - like edge network, VPC, subnet, load balancer, every instance, OS and application
  • Automate security best practices
  • Protect data in transit and at rest - Encryption, tokenization and access control
  • Keep people away from data - Reduce or eliminate the need for direct access or manual processing of data
  • Prepare for security events - Run incident response simulations and use tools with automation to increase your speed for detection, investigation and recovery

Reliability

— Ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruption such as misconfiguration or transient network issues

— Design Principles

  • Test recovery procedures - Use automation to simulate different failures or to recreate scenarios that led to failures before
  • Automatically recover from failure - Anticipate and remediate failures before they occur
  • Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability - Distribute requests across multiple, smaller resources to ensure that they don't share a common point of failure
  • Stop guessing capacity - Maintain the optimal level to satisfy demand without over or under provisioning - use auto scaling
  • Manage change in automation - Use automation to make changes to infrastructure

Performance Efficiency

— Includes the ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technology changes

— Design Principles

  • Democratize advanced technologies - Advance technologies become services and hence you can focus more on product development
  • Go global in minutes - Easy deployment in multiple regions
  • Use Serverless architecture - avoid burden of managing servers
  • Experiment more often - Easy to carry out comparative testing
  • Mechanical sympathy - be aware of all AWS services

Cost Optimization

— Includes the ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point

— Design Principles

  • Adopt a consumption mode - Pay only for what you use
  • Measure overall efficiency - Use CloudWatch
  • Stop spending money on data center operations - AWS does the infrastructure part and enables customer to focus on organization projects
  • Analyze and attribute expenditure - Accurately identification of system usage and costs, helps measure return on investment (ROI) - make sure to use tags
  • Use managed and application level service to reduce cost of ownership - As managed services operate at cloud scale, they offer cost per transaction or service