AWS has been helping customers migrate workloads for years now. In 2012 AWS solutions architects started to develop a ‘Well-Architected’ initiative to share with customers on the best practices they had adopted from experience doing many workload migrations. In 2015 this initiative had evolved enough to be published as a white-paper entitled “AWS Well-Architected Framework”. This document was recently updated (November 2017) to contain the latest and most up to date design principles, including an Operation Excellence pillar, that you should use as your foundation to deploy or review workloads and your processes in AWS.
The AWS Well-Architected Framework has 6 key pillars:
- Operational Excellence – aligns operational practices with business objectives
- Security – security in depth, traceability
- Reliability – capacity, recovery and testing
- Performance Efficiency – resource optimisation
- Cost Optimisation – consumption, analysis and focus on reducing costs
- Sustainability - long-term environmental, economic, and societal impact of your business activities.
More recently, the need for workload specific Well Architected Frameworks has been identified. These workload specific Well-Architected Frameworks are known as a Lens. Currently, Serverless Applications and High Performance Computing lenses are available.
Getting Well-Architected on AWS
By optimising your architecture around these pillars, you gain the benefits of a well-architected design in AWS:
- Stop guessing your capacity needs
- Test systems at production scale
- Automate for easier architectural experimentation
- Allow for evolutionary architectures
- Data-driven architectures
- Improve through game days
How the AWS Well-Architected Framework works?
AC3 offers a Well-Architected Review designed to educate customers on architectural best practices for building and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud, and to assess their current workloads.
AC3 uses the AWS Well-Architected Review principles and tools to deliver a comprehensive review of a single workload. A workload is defined as a set of machines, instances, or servers that together enable the delivery of a service or application to internal or external customers. Examples include an ecommerce website, business application, web application, etc. Through this review and guidance from the AWS Well-Architected Framework, AC3 will provide the customer an analysis of the workload through the eyes of the Well-Architected Framework pillars, as well as a plan to address areas that do not comply with framework recommendations.
The value of a Well-Architected Review
The value is under-priced. For a small price, you gain huge insights.
- Understand potential impacts
- Visibility of risks
- Consistent approach to architecture review
- Recommended remediations
- A Well-Architected Review is not an audit, and shouldn’t be seen as such. It’s an opportunity for everyone to learn and understand their systems, processes and the workload better, so that together you are able to improve your position and help the business achieve their goals.
AC3's Well-Architected Review
- A half-day on-site questionnaire with your stakeholders by our Certified Solution Architects to gather data on your workloads in your business
- Analysis of the collected data, cross-analysis of the workload via the guidance offered by the Framework, and formulation of any recommended remediation, if applicable
- A Well-Architected report, outlining all findings and recommendations
- A plan of attack on how we can help to remediate any findings
Other resources
Other resources: Blog: New version of the AWS Well-Architected Framework and the AWS Well-Architected Tool AWS Page: AWS Well-Architected Reviews