The AWS Well-Architected Framework describes key concepts, design principles, and architectural best practices for designing and running workloads in the cloud.
Using the Framework, an organisation can measure its operations and architectures against best practices to identify areas for improvement and design Well- Architected workloads with operations in mind.
In this three-part series, Three will detail the six pillars of the Well-Architected Framework. These explorations should help you understand the pros and cons of decisions you make while building systems on AWS.
THE OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE PILLAR
The Operational Excellence pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework focuses on running and monitoring systems and continually improving processes and procedures to deliver new features and bug fixes to customers quickly and reliably.
Operational excellence is a resolution to build software correctly while consistently delivering great customer experiences (CX). This commitment helps focus a team’s time on building customer-first features and reduces the pressures of maintenance and firefighting, resulting in streamlined systems and a balanced workload that supports the primary outcome of outstanding CX.
To follow the design principles of operational excellence: perform operations as code; make frequent, small, reversible changes; refine operations procedures frequently; anticipate failure; learn from all operational failures; use managed services and implement observability for actionable insights.
This pillar is divided into four best practice areas. First, Organisation sets out that teams must have shared understandings of entire workloads, individual roles within them and shared business goals, while Prepare idealises workloads that are designed to provide insight into their own status to allow effective support procedures.
Next, Operate defines success as the measured achievement of defined business and customer outcomes. Finally, Evolve preaches learning, sharing, and continuously improving as the keys to sustaining operational excellence.
THE SECURITY PILLAR
The Security pillar of the AWS Well- Architected Framework places emphasis on protection, describing how to take advantage of cloud technologies to protect data, systems, and assets in a way that can improve your security posture.
Security is a shared responsibility, which relieves a customer’s operational burden and provides flexibility and customer control. AWS manages the infrastructure from the host operating system (OS) and virtualisation layer to facility security, while customers handle the guest OS, updates, patches, application software, and configuration of the AWS provided security group firewall.
To follow the design principles of operational excellence: implement a strong identity foundation, maintain traceability, apply security at all layers, automate security best practices, protect data in transit and at rest, keep people away from data and prepare for security events.
There are seven best practice areas for the security pillar: Security foundations, Identity and access management, Detection, Infrastructure protection, Data protection, Incident response and Application security.
Together, they present security as an ongoing effort and incidents as chances to tighten architecture security. Having strong controls, automating responses to incidents, guarding infrastructure at multiple levels, and managing well- classified data with encryption provide a total defence ideal for any organisation.
Reach out to AC3 for a Well-Architected Review of your organisation.