Data Analytics Lens

Publication date: December 22, 2023 (Document revisions)

This document describes the AWS Well-Architected Data Analytics Lens, a collection of customer-proven best practices for designing well-architected analytics workloads. The Data Analytics Lens contains insights that AWS has gathered from real-world case studies, and helps you learn the key design elements of well-architected analytics workloads along with recommendations for improvement. The document is intended for IT architects, developers, and team members who build and operate analytics systems.

How to use this lens

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand the pros and cons of decisions you make while building systems on AWS.

By using the Framework, you learn architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable systems in the cloud. It provides a way for you to consistently measure your architectures against best practices and identify areas for improvement. We believe that having well-architected systems greatly increases the likelihood of business success.

In this lens, we focus on how to design, deploy, and architect your analytics application workloads in the AWS Cloud. For brevity, we have only covered details from the Well-Architected Framework that are specific to analytics workloads. Also consider best practices and questions that have not been included in this document when designing your architecture. We therefore recommend that you read the AWS Well-Architected Framework whitepaper.

This document is intended for those in technology roles, such as chief technology officers (CTOs), architects, developers, and operations team members. After reading this document, you will understand AWS best practices and strategies to use when designing architectures for analytics applications and environment.

There are many methods for implementing a data platform, therefore there are many options your organization must consider before designing a solution. In this whitepaper, we detail specific architectural approaches that can meet your design objectives. You must consider whether the proposed solution meets your organizational architecture principles and whether your team resources have the experience to implement such a solution.

Custom lens availability

Custom lenses extend the best practice guidance provided by AWS Well-Architected Tool. AWS WA Tool allows you to create your own custom lenses, or to use lenses created by others that have been shared with you.

To determine if a custom lens is available for the lens described in this whitepaper, reach out to your Technical Account Manager (TAM), Solutions Architect (SA), or AWS Support.