Reliability Pillar - AWS Well-Architected Framework

Publication date: December 6, 2023 (Document revisions)

The focus of this paper is the reliability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It provides guidance to help customers apply best practices in the design, delivery, and maintenance of Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments.

Introduction

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand the pros and cons of decisions you make while building workloads on AWS. By using the Framework you will learn architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable workloads in the cloud. It provides a way to consistently measure your architectures against best practices and identify areas for improvement. We believe that having well-architected workload greatly increases the likelihood of business success.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is based on six pillars:

• Operational Excellence

• Security

• Reliability

• Performance Efficiency

• Cost Optimization

• Sustainability

This paper focuses on the reliability pillar and how to apply it to your solutions. Achieving reliability can be challenging in traditional on-premises environments due to single points of failure, lack of automation, and lack of elasticity. By adopting the practices in this paper you will build architectures that have strong foundations, resilient architecture, consistent change management, and proven failure recovery processes.

This paper is intended for those in technology roles, such as chief technology officers (CTOs), architects, developers, and operations team members. After reading this paper, you will understand AWS best practices and strategies to use when designing cloud architectures for reliability. This paper includes high-level implementation details and architectural patterns, as well as references to additional resources.