Cloud computing continues to grow every passing year and opportunities are abundant. CSPs are going the extra mile to meet the urging requirement for novel solutions, which in turn has led them to emphasize building a strong architecture. To migrate an existing product to the cloud or develop one from scratch, plenty of resources and dozens of services are involved, used on the basis of requirements.Â
Post-architecting the solution on AWS, the infrastructure can entail more complexities, resulting in the overlook of cost-saving opportunities or innovations. An AWS well-architected framework helps business get a clarity on the bottlenecks and benefits linked with decisions made during the application development on AWS. This framework solution comprises a stack of principles and queries across five pillars that define the trajectory of design areas in every architecture.
The Five Pillars of AWS Well-Architected Framework
Performance Efficiency
Performance efficiency involves ensuring that a system or workload delivers a performance at maximum potential for a set of resources utilized, namely, locality, database, storage, and instances). Here, the focus inclines toward efficient leverage of compute resources to fulfil dedicated requirements while maintaining that efficiency as technologies evolve and demand dynamics shift. The design principles include democratizing advanced technologies, rapid global deployment, using serverless architecture, and experimenting continuously.
Reliability
This pillar ensures that a system is architected in a way to meet operational thresholds for a certain span of time. This also enables the system in meeting increasing workload demands and recovering from failures with minimum or no disruption. A key benefit of AWS is that it’s considered to be highly reliable compared to data centers at times of failure or change control. The reliability pillar highlights 3 areas of concerns, namely, failure management, change management, and foundations. The design principles comprise testing recovery processes, automatic recovery from failures, horizontal scaling to increase the availability of the aggregate system, stopping the guessing capacity, and managing change in automation.
Security
The pillar of security centers on the protection of assets, systems, and information together with delivering business requirements. A shared security model drives AWS, where AWS is responsible for cloud security and users for their content and applications using AWS services. Key design principles of the security pillar engulfs implementing a robust identity foundation, enabling security & traceability events, applying layered security throughout, automating security best practices, safeguarding the data at rest and in transit, and keeping people away from data.
Cost Optimization
Cost optimization is dedicated toward achieving the lowest possible cost for a workload or system. The focus is on optimization of cost while keeping in mind the account requirements without ignoring aspects such as performance, reliability, and security. Here, needless expenses are avoided through recognition and control of spending, offering right resources, ensuring cost-effective execution of scaling, and tracking cost. The design principles of the cost optimization pillar include adoption of a consumption model, measurement of overall efficiency, adoption of managed services, arresting expenditure on data center operations, and analysis & attribution of expenditure.
Operational Excellence
This pillar is an amalgamation of monitoring system, continuous improvement efforts, and processes to deliver business value and improve supporting procedures. Operational excellence focuses on the development and maintenance of AWS-based environments, which are not only scalable but also effective and efficient across the board. With this pillar, businesses are ensured that their cloud infrastructure is capable of operating changes efficiently, reacting to events, and automating standard tasks & processes for successful management of daily operations.
Key Benefits Linked With AWS Well-Architected Framework
Optimization of an architecture on the basis of these pillars can help organizations gain the ability to
- Rapidly build and deploy
- Eliminate technology risks before they occur
- Represent their product on an unmatched level
- Make triumphant & informed decisions
- Involve themselves in a variety of AWS programs
- Implement best practices recommended by AWS
- Publish case studies of their products on the AWS website
Overall, the AWS well-architected framework offers architectural best practices around the 5 pillars to facilitate the design and operation of reliable, efficient, cost-effective, and secure systems in the cloud. The AWS well-architected framework for your architecture will aid you build efficient and stable systems that further complement your functional requirements.
