PERF05-BP01 Understand how networking impacts performance - AWS Well-Architected Framework (2023-04-10)
Implementation guidanceResources

PERF05-BP01 Understand how networking impacts performance

Analyze and understand how network-related decisions impact workload performance. The network is responsible for the connectivity between application components, cloud services, edge networks and on-premises data and therefor it can highly impact workload performance. In addition to workload performance, user experience is also impacted by network latency, bandwidth, protocols, location, network congestion, jitter, throughput, and routing rules.

Desired outcome: Have a documented list of networking requirements from the workload including latency, packet size, routing rules, protocols, and supporting traffic patterns. Review the available networking solutions and identify which service meets your workload networking characteristics. Cloud-based networks can be quickly rebuilt, so evolving your network architecture over time is necessary to improve performance efficiency.

Common anti-patterns:

  • All traffic flows through your existing data centers.

  • You overbuild Direct Connect sessions without understanding the actual usage requirements.

  • You don’t consider workload characteristics and encryption overhead when defining your networking solutions.

  • You use on-premises concepts and strategies for networking solutions in the cloud.

Benefits of establishing this best practice: Understanding how networking impacts workload performance will help you identify potential bottlenecks, improve user experience, increase reliability, and lower operational maintenance as the workload changes.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: High

Implementation guidance

Identify important network performance metrics of your workload and capture its networking characteristics. Define and document requirements as part of a data-driven approach, using benchmarking or load testing. Use this data to identify where your network solution is constrained, and examine configuration options that could improve the workload. Understand the cloud-native networking features and options available and how they can impact your workload performance based on the requirements. Each networking feature has advantages and disadvantages and can be configured to meet your workload characteristics and scale based on your needs.

Implementation steps:

  1. Define and document networking performance requirements:

    1. Include metrics such as network latency, bandwidth, protocols, locations, traffic patterns (spikes and frequency), throughput, encryption, inspection, and routing rules

  2. Capture your foundational networking characteristics:

    1. VPC Flow Logs 

    2. AWS Transit Gateway metrics

    3. AWS PrivateLink metrics

  3. Capture your application networking characteristics:

    1. Elastic Network Adaptor

    2. AWS App Mesh metrics

    3. Amazon API Gateway metrics

  4. Capture your edge networking characteristics:

    1. Amazon CloudFront metrics

    2. Amazon Route 53 metrics

    3. AWS Global Accelerator metrics

  5. Capture your hybrid networking characteristics:

    1. Direct Connect metrics

    2. AWS Site-to-Site VPN metrics

    3. AWS Client VPN metrics

    4. AWS Cloud WAN metrics

  6. Capture your security networking characteristics:

    1. AWS Shield, WAF, and Network Firewall metrics

  7. Capture end-to-end performance metrics with tracing tools:

    1. AWS X-Ray

    2. Amazon CloudWatch RUM

  8. Benchmark and test network performance:

    1. Benchmark network throughput: Some factors that can affect EC2 network performance when the instances are in the same VPC. Measure the network bandwidth between EC2 Linux instances in the same VPC.

    2. Perform load tests to experiment with networking solutions and options

Level of effort for the implementation plan: There is a medium level of effort to document workload networking requirements, options, and available solutions.

Resources

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