Well-Architected Framework pillars
The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides architectural best practices for designing and operating workloads in the cloud. The Framework consists of six pillars:
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Operational excellence - Includes the ability to run, monitor, and gain insights into workloads. It enables delivering business value and improves supporting processes and procedures. Best practice focus areas include: organization, prepare, operate, and evolve.
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Security - Includes the ability to protect information, systems, and assets. It enables delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies. Best practice focus areas include: security foundations, identity and access management, detection, infrastructure protection, data protection, incident response, and application security.
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Reliability - Includes the ability of a workload to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions. Ensures a workload performs its intended function correctly and consistently when it’s expected to. It enables dynamically acquiring computing resources to meet demand, and mitigating disruptions such as misconfigurations and transient network issues. Best practice focus areas include: foundations, workload architecture, change management, and failure management.
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Performance efficiency - Focuses on the efficient use of computing resources to meet requirements. It enables maintaining efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve. Best practice focus areas include: selection, review, monitoring, and trade-offs.
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Cost optimization - Includes the continuous process of refinement and improvement of a system over its entire lifecycle. It enables building and operating cost-aware systems that minimize costs, maximize return on investment, and achieve business outcomes. Best practice focus areas include: Cloud Financial Management, expenditure and usage awareness, resource cost-effectiveness, resource demand and supply management, and optimization.
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Sustainability - Focuses on environmental impacts, especially energy consumption and efficiency, since they are important levers for architects to inform direct action to reduce resource usage. Best practice focus areas include: Region selection, alignment to demand, software and architecture, data, hardware and services, and process and culture.
While this paper focuses on the details specific to ML workloads, refer to the AWS Well-Architected Framework whitepaper for more information on the Framework and its pillars.
