AWS Well Architected Framework
- 2. What is the AWS Well Architected Framework? WHITEPAPER The AWS Well Architected Framework is a white paper, published by Amazon Web Services. It is written by a team of AWS Solutions Architects and aims to share best practices and core strategies for architecting in the cloud. The White paper is designed for all levels of technical employee including: ▪ CTOs ▪ Architects ▪ Developers ▪ Operations Team Members The paper outlines 5 pillars which are the foundation of creating a Well Architected Framework. It also discusses general design principles to facilitate good design in the cloud. https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS_Well- Architected_Framework.pdf 2
- 4. General Design Principles 4 Stop guessing your capacity needs With the cloud, there is no need to have resources idling away doing nothing or have downtime due to capacity being exceeded, Scale up or down as needed. Test systems at production scale In the cloud, you can create a production scale test environment on-demand and simply shut it down as soon as you are finished 🔨 Automate to make architectural experimentation easier Automation allows you to create and replicate your systems at low cost and avoid the expense of manual effort.
- 5. General Design Principles cont. 5 Allow for evolutionary architectures Rather than static one time architecture choices, businesses can take advantage of innovations and change their architecture. e.g. New Instance Classes / Lambda vs EC2 Drive architectures using data In the cloud, you can collect data on how your architectural choices affect the behaviour of your workload. This lets you make fact-based decisions on how to improve your workload. e.g. MySQL RDS vs Aurora Improve through game days Test how your architecture and processes perform by regularly scheduling game days to simulate production events. e.g. Black Friday Deals
- 6. Operational Excellence Design Principles ▪ Perform operations with code ▪ Annotate documentation ▪ Make frequent , small, reversible changes ▪ Anticipate failure - Test for responses to unexpected events - Simian army (Chaos monkey, chaos snail) used by Netflix ▪ Learn from operational events and failures ▪ Refine operations procedure frequently Questions ▪ How are you evolving your workload while minimizing the impact of change? ▪ How do you monitor your workload to ensure it is operating as expected? ▪ How do you respond to unplanned operational events? ▪ How is escalation managed when responding to unplanned operational events? 6
- 7. Security Design Principles ▪ Implement a strong identity foundation ▪ Enable traceability ▪ Apply security at all layers ▪ Automate security best practices ▪ Protect data in transit and at rest ▪ Prepare for security events Questions ▪ How are you protecting access to and use of the AWS root account credentials? ▪ How are you enforcing network and host level boundary protection? ▪ How are you encrypting and protecting your data at rest? ▪ How are you encrypting and protecting your data in transit? ▪ How are you managing keys and credentials? ▪ How are you capturing and analyzing logs? ▪ Sample of 6 questions, full 12 are in the whitepaper 7
- 8. Reliability Design Principles ▪ Test recovery procedures ▪ Automatically recover from failure ▪ Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability ▪ Stop guessing capacity ▪ Manage change in automation Questions ▪ How does your system adapt to changes in demand? ▪ How are you monitoring AWS resources? ▪ How are you executing change? ▪ How are you backing up your data? ▪ How does your system withstand component failures? ▪ How are you testing resiliency? ▪ How are you planning for disaster recovery? 8
- 9. Performance Efficiency Design Principles ▪ Democratize advanced technologies ▪ Go global in minutes ▪ Use Serverless architecture ▪ Experiment more often ▪ Mechanical sympathy Questions ▪ How do you select the best performing architecture? ▪ How did you select your compute solution? ▪ How do you select your storage solution? ▪ How do you select your database solution? ▪ How do you configure your networking solution? ▪ How do you ensure that you continue to have the most appropriate resource type as new resource types and features are introduced? 9
- 10. Cost Optimisation Design Principles ▪ Adopt a consumption model ▪ Measure overall efficiency ▪ Stop spending money on data centre operations ▪ Analyze and attribute expenditure ▪ Use managed services to reduce the cost of ownership Questions ▪ Are you considering cost when you select AWS services for your solution? ▪ Have you sized your resources to meet your cost targets? ▪ Have you selected the appropriate pricing model to meet cost targets? ▪ How do you make sure your capacity matches but does not exceed what you need? ▪ How are you monitoring usage and spending? ▪ Do you decommission resources that you no longer need or stop resources that are temporarily not needed? 10
Editor's Notes
- #4: Operational Excellence: Run and monitor systems to deliver business value & continually improve supporting processes and procedures Security: Protect information, systems and assets while delivering value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies Reliability: The ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues. Performance Efficiency: Use resources efficiently to meet system requirements and to maintain efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve. Cost Optimization: The ability to avoid or eliminate unneeded cost or suboptimal resources
- #8: PROTECTION - Multiple layers of defense are advisable in any environment. - Boundary protection – VPC security Groups - NACLs - Monitoring points of ingress/outgress - Comprehensive logging - Monitoring Alerting KEYS Rotation Securely stored
- #10: Democratize advanced technologies Amazon’s way of saying use managed resources where possible, especially where the technology is difficult/complicated. e.g. Media Transcoding, NoSQL databases Mechanical Sympathy - Understand the hardware makes you a better developer. Consider data access patterns when selecting database or storage approaches. Consider instance type? Optimized for memory vs compute How do you ensure that you continue to have the most appropriate resource type as new resource types and features are introduced? - In other words, how do you ensure the correct choice you made stays corrects as new products/instance classes are brought to market.
- #11: Adopt a consumption model Pay only for what you need. Stop services when not in use. 75% reduction in costs if used for 40 hours of developer’s work week, rather than 168 hours. Have you sized your resources to meet your cost targets? i.e, a small instance that 23 hours to run an operation could actually cost more than a large instance that could run code < 1 hour Pricing Model Spot / On-Demand / Reserved