Phase 2 - Getting started

Architecting

Architectural principles and services are used to develop technical cloud strategies, assist with cloud migration efforts, review workload architectures, and provide guidance on how to address high-risk issues. AWS uses these skills to assist customers in building secure, reliable, cost efficient, high performance, and operationally sound applications that simply could not exist on premises. AWS formalized these architectural best practices into a framework called the AWS Well Architected Framework.

AWS Well-Architected Framework

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps your organization understand the pros and cons of decisions while building systems on AWS. By using the Framework, you will learn architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud. It provides a way for you to consistently measure your architectures against best practices and identify areas for improvement.

The process for reviewing an architecture is a constructive conversation about architectural decisions, and is not an audit mechanism. Having well-architected systems greatly increases the likelihood of business success.

AWS Well-Architected elements

The framework provides a consistent approach to evaluating systems against the qualities you expect from modern cloud-based systems, and the remediation that would be required to achieve those qualities. The AWS Well-Architected Framework describes the key concepts, design principles, and architectural best practices for designing and running workloads in the cloud. By answering a set of foundational questions, you learn how well your architecture aligns with cloud best practices and are provided guidance for making improvements.

• Operational excellence pillar — The operational excellence pillar focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business value, and continually improving processes and procedures. Key topics include automating changes, responding to events, and defining standards to manage daily operations.

• Security pillar — The security pillar focuses on protecting information and systems. Key topics include confidentiality and integrity of data, identifying and managing who can do what with privilege management, protecting systems, and establishing controls to detect security events.

• Reliability pillar — The reliability pillar focuses on ensuring a workload performs its intended function correctly and consistently when it is expected to. A resilient workload quickly recovers from failures to meet organizational demand. Key topics include distributed system design, recovery planning, and how to handle change.

• Performance efficiency pillar — The performance efficiency pillar focuses on using IT and computing resources efficiently. Key topics include selecting the right resource types and sizes based on workload requirements, monitoring performance, and making informed decisions to maintain efficiency as business needs evolve.

• Cost optimization pillar — The cost optimization pillar focuses on avoiding unnecessary costs. Key topics include understanding and controlling where money is being spent, selecting the most appropriate and right number of resource types, analyzing spend over time, and scaling to meet organizational needs without overspending.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides a set of questions that enable you to review an existing or proposed architecture. It also provides a set of AWS best practices for each pillar. Using the Framework in your architecture will help you produce stable and efficient systems, which allow you to focus on your functional requirements.