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AWS Well Architected Framework

The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides a consistent approach to evaluating and improving your cloud architecture to ensure it is robust, secure, efficient, and cost-effective. Learners will have the chance to explore these concepts in a read-only, live AWS environment, allowing them to observe firsthand how well-architected principles are applied in a real-world e-commerce setting." It includes six key pillars:

1. Operational Excellence​

  • Focus: Running and monitoring systems to deliver business value, improving processes and procedures.
  • Key Concepts:
    • Operational procedures: Define and manage standard operating procedures, checklists, and runbooks.
    • Infrastructure as code: Automate operations using code, including deployment, monitoring, and response to events.
    • Monitoring: Set up comprehensive monitoring with CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, and other logging services to gain insights into operational health.
    • Incident response: Prepare for failure, create plans, and practice failure scenarios (e.g., game days).
  • Best Practices: Design workloads to support continuous improvement, automate changes, monitor systems, and respond to events quickly.

2. Security​

  • Focus: Protecting data, systems, and assets by implementing strong security controls.
  • Key Concepts:
    • Identity and access management: Control access with IAM roles and policies, enforce least privilege.
    • Detective controls: Implement logging, monitoring, and alerts (e.g., AWS CloudTrail, AWS Security Hub) to detect security events.
    • Infrastructure protection: Use security services like AWS Shield, WAF, VPC security groups, and network ACLs to protect the infrastructure.
    • Data protection: Encrypt data in transit and at rest using AWS KMS, maintain backup and recovery strategies.
    • Incident response: Develop an incident response plan, conduct regular drills, and use services like AWS Config to track changes.
  • Best Practices: Implement a strong identity foundation, enable traceability, secure your infrastructure, and implement security mechanisms across all layers.

3. Reliability​

  • Focus: Ensuring workloads recover from failures and meet customer demand.
  • Key Concepts:
    • Foundations: Set up accounts, monitoring, network topology, and recoverability as the foundational components.
    • Workload architecture: Use distributed systems to improve reliability (e.g., multi-AZ deployments, Auto Scaling).
    • Change management: Automate change management to limit the impact of changes on the workload.
    • Failure management: Develop and test recovery procedures, apply fault isolation (e.g., circuit breakers).
  • Best Practices: Monitor workloads, implement fault-tolerant components, automate recovery, and manage quotas and limits effectively.

4. Performance Efficiency​

  • Focus: Using resources efficiently to meet system requirements and adapt to changing needs.
  • Key Concepts:
    • Selection: Choose the right instance types, storage, database, and network options that align with workload requirements.
    • Review: Regularly review your choices and refine your architecture to take advantage of new AWS services and features.
    • Monitoring: Use tools like Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray to monitor performance and identify bottlenecks.
    • Trade-offs: Make informed trade-offs (e.g., latency vs. throughput) to optimize workload performance.
  • Best Practices: Use autoscaling, select the right storage and compute resources, use managed services, and consider global deployment for better performance.

5. Cost Optimization​

  • Focus: Avoiding unnecessary costs and maximizing the value of your cloud investment.
  • Key Concepts:
    • Cost-effective resources: Use the appropriate service types, sizes, and pricing models (e.g., spot instances, reserved instances).
    • Expenditure awareness: Implement cost allocation tags and set budgets using AWS Budgets.
    • Cost management: Use AWS Cost Explorer and detailed billing reports to manage costs proactively.
    • Optimizing over time: Continuously evaluate costs as workload requirements change to optimize spending.
  • Best Practices: Implement budgeting and cost tracking, use managed services to reduce operational overhead, optimize resource allocation, and leverage Reserved Instances.

6. Sustainability (New Pillar)​

  • Focus: Minimize the environmental impact of running cloud workloads.
  • Key Concepts:
    • Data efficiency: Store and manage data with minimal redundancy and leverage data compression.
    • Compute efficiency: Use efficient instance types, implement serverless architectures, and offload computing to managed services.
    • Carbon awareness: Utilize regions with the most efficient power consumption and lower carbon footprints.
  • Best Practices: Implement practices to reduce compute and storage usage, use more energy-efficient architecture, and review and iterate to align with sustainability goals.

Summary of the Well-Architected Framework​

  • Evaluate regularly: Continuously assess your workloads using the Well-Architected Tool in AWS to identify areas for improvement.
  • Automate: Strive to implement automation across all pillars to enhance operational efficiency and reliability.
  • Align with business needs: Each pillar helps align your architecture with security, operational efficiency, cost management, and performance requirements.