AWS Well Architected Framework

The pillars

of what you expected from a well put together & modern cloud environment.

  1. Operational Excellence
  2. Security
  3. Reliability
  4. Performance efficiency
  5. Cost Optimization
  6. Sustainability

When architecting workloads, you make trade-offs between pillars based on your business context.

Security and operational excellence are generally not traded-off against the other pillars.

General Design Principles

these are the points that stuck out for one reason or another:

  • Drive architectures using data: see how your architecture decisions affect your workload(s).
  • Improve through game days: “Test how your architecture and processes perform by regularly scheduling game days to simulate events in production”.

Operational Excellence

The ability to support development & run workloads effectively, gain insight into their operation… continuously improve process & procedures to deliver business value

Design Principles

  • Perform operations as code: think along the lines of IaC. I’ve spent some time reading into the why & the how of it. reduce human error, automate away the stuff that machines are good at, as humans, focus on the ‘creative’ elements of delivering value.
  • Make frequent, small, reversible changes: without affecting customers when possible.
  • Refine operations procedures frequently
  • Anticipate failure: test your failure scenarios & validate their impact.
  • Learn from all operational failures

Best practices

  • Organization
  • Prepare
  • Operate
  • Evolve

side note - AWS leadership principles