PERF04-BP01 Understand how networking impacts performance - AWS Well-Architected Framework
Implementation guidanceResources

PERF04-BP01 Understand how networking impacts performance

Analyze and understand how network-related decisions impact your workload to provide efficient performance and improved user experience.

Common anti-patterns:

  • All traffic flows through your existing data centers.

  • You route all traffic through central firewalls instead of using cloud-native network security tools.

  • You provision AWS Direct Connect connections without understanding 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 helps 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

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

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.

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