Thinking of getting started with AWS cloud computing or migrating your existing workloads to AWS? Here is a quick guide on how the 5 pillars of AWS’s well-architected framework will help you build a secure, high performing, resilient and efficient cloud infrastructure for your workloads.
So basically, the AWS well-architected framework describes the main design principles, concepts, and the best architectural practices to run your workloads in the AWS cloud.
The 5 pillars of AWS well-architected framework are:
- Operational Excellence
- Security
- Reliability
- Performance Efficiency
- Cost optimization
Let’s take a closer look at each of these pillars.
OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE
The Operational excellence pillar outlines how DevOps /cloud teams should run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures in order to deliver business value.
To achieve these objectives, the operational excellence pillar utilizes the following principles:
- Perform operations as code.
The entire cloud environment can be defined as code. Operations procedures can also be defined as code and updated as code. This helps in limiting human error and enabling consistency in event response.
- Making frequent, small and reversible changes.
This makes it easy to determine the cause of a problem if it occurs as compared to making large changes all at once. The reverse changes made should not affect customers – if possible.
- Refine operations procedures frequently.
Frequently reviewing operations procedures helps the entire team to be familiar with them and participate in areas that can be updated.
- Anticipate failure.
In order to ensure future failures are curbed, the team should carry out a pre-mortem exercise to assess where failure could occur.
- Learn from all operational failures
Sharing with the team past failures helps to derive key lessons to be learnt.
SECURITY
The security pillar focuses on setting mechanisms that protect data, systems and assets.
There are 7 key design principles that help in enhancing security in the AWS cloud. These are:
- Implement a strong identity foundation
Here the principle of least privilege is implemented and separation of duties enforced.
- Enable traceability
Metrics collection and log integration help in investigation and remediation in the event a problem occurs.
- Apply security at all layers
Ensure security is applied in all aspects of cloud infrastructure; compute, storage, networks etc
- Automate security best practices
Automation helps to scale easily, quickly and in a secure way in the cloud.
- Protect data in transit and at rest
Data should always be protected whether in transit or at rest using the appropriate controls. These controls include tokenization, encryption and access control.
- Keep people away from data
This involves eliminating the need to access data directly or process data manually. Ultimately the risk of mishandling data, modification or human error is eliminated.
- Prepare for security events
In case of a security event, ensure there is speedy detection, investigation and recovery through the use of automation and response simulations.
RELIABILITY
A well-architected framework outlines mechanisms for any application or system to provide services to users or customers when expected to.
To achieve this the reliability pillar has 5 design principles:
- Automatically recover from failure
Based on the needs of a business, there may be requirements in place to have recovery control in place and the time taken to recover to be very minimal.
- Test recovery procedures
A successful backup can only be termed as so when restoration can be done successfully.
- Manage change in automation
In order for change to occur, there should be a proper plan, documentation, testing, approval and a backup plan in case the changes made break the environment.
- Stop guessing capacity
Use only the capacity needed for production and avoid saturation or over-provisioning.
- Scale horizontally to increase the availability
This simply eliminates a single point of failure.
AWS defines availability as a percentage uptime such as 99.9% over a period of time mainly a month or year
PERFORMANCE EFFICIENCY
The performance efficiency pillar guides the effective use of computing resources to meet system and business requirements.
The performance efficiency pillar revolves around five design principles:
- Decentralize advanced technologies
You may want to consider consuming some of the advanced technologies as a service. This helps you to focus on developing the product rather than provisioning resources and managing them.
- Go global in minutes to ensure services accessed by users are close to them as possible
By leveraging AWS’s global footprint, deploy your applications to multiple regions to reduce latency and for a better customer experience.
- Go serverless and leave the management of physical servers to cloud providers
Serverless architecture helps you to run code directly without running and maintaining servers used.
- Experiment more often
Doing experiments more often helps to discover which configuration works best for the business
- Consider mechanical sympathy
Use an approach that aligns best with your goals from a data-centric perspective.
COST OPTIMIZATION
The cost optimization pillar aims at providing optimum and resilient business solutions at the lowest possible cost to the user. When using cloud services, money is spent on services used.
There are 5 principles that guide users in cost optimization:
- adopting a consumption model
This helps to pay only for services used and to scale upwards or downwards based on demand.
- Always monitor application efficiency
Use tracking metrics to assess the business output of the workloads you are running. This will increase efficiency and overall performance.
- Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy-lifting
Let AWS do all the heavy lifting of data centre operations such as racking and powering servers. Your main focus should be on customer and business logic.
- Analyze the attributed expenditure using a tagging method
For accurate return on investment calculations, AWS cloud makes it easy to identify the cost and usage of workloads attributed to specific departments.
- Implement cloud financial management
Cloud financial management should be set as one of your company’s financial goals. This will accelerate business value and help achieve financial success.
We have gone through the 5 pillars of an AWS well-architected framework. We at boldlink can help you in your journey to the AWS cloud by doing a well-architected review end-to-end. Schedule a call with us TODAY!
Happy cloud computing -:)
