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Benchmark Your Apps Against the AWS Well-Architected Framework

AWS introduced best practices to review and improve traditional or proposed architectures through its widely renowned AWS Well-Architected Framework. The framework introduces five pillars where each pillar is composed of separate practices for a better application and workload architecture to solve challenges many customers were having. Those challenges involve a lack of internal knowledge, rightsizing cloud environments, reducing costly overheads, a lack of automation, and executing AWS best practices. The Well-Architected framework is gaining popularity among clients seeking infrastructure performance that only keeps getting better over time. The supporting Well-Architected Review was created to improve the customer experience and help sharpen up AWS environments.

The best way to proactively utilize this framework is for building secured, efficient, and reliable application infrastructure. Additionally, consultants help companies through the AWS Partner Network (APN) to facilitate this framework by evaluating current architectures to make design changes through a Well-Architected Review.

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AWS Well-Architected Framework in Serverless Part I: Security

Welcome to part one of our five-part “AWS Well-Architected Framework in Serverless” series. In this article, we’ll give you a short introduction to the AWS Well-Architected Framework and dive deeper into the Security pillar to explain it and some actionable ideas related to it.

To learn more about the AWS Well-Architected Framework (WAF) through the serverless lens and how to build Well-Architected architectures, make sure to attend our upcoming webinar on Friday, 27 November. We’ll be joined by a special guest, Tim Robinson, creator, and geo lead for the AWS Well-Architected Framework. More information and RSVP here.

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Pillars of AWS Well-Architected Framework

Cloud computing is proliferating each passing year, meaning that there are plenty of opportunities. Creating a cloud solution calls for a strong architecture. If the foundation is not solid then the solution faces issues of integrity and system workload. AWS's five pillars help cloud architects to create a secure, high-performing, resilient and efficient infrastructure.

In this post, we'll take a look at the five pillars of AWS well-architected framework.

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Leveraging The New AWS Well-Architected Tool

Review and refinement are integral components of cloud computing best practices. In order to ensure a reliable and efficient cloud environment, regular reviews need to be performed at certain intervals. The goal is simple: making workloads more robust and protected while maintaining cost efficiency.

We have covered the AWS Well-Architected Framework—a complete framework for building solutions for a wide range of industries—extensively in the past. ICYMI, don’t forget to check out our blog series on the Five Pillars that help create secure and reliable cloud architecture which is optimized for operational excellence, performance efficiency, and cost. To make following these best practices easier, AWS has recently released the AWS Well-Architected Tool, making assessing your cloud infrastructure that much easier for administrators.

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Pillar #2 Of The AWS Well-Architected Framework: Security

Today’s post continues our sequence on the 5 Pillars of AWS Well-Architected Frameworks. Catch up on the first post here on Operational Excellence. In today’s cloud computing landscape, security is paramount. The increasing number and intensity of cyber attacks, the challenges faced by systems and users, and the business objectives that need to be achieved all require the highest standard of cloud security. Setting up a secure environment is only the beginning. Ways to deal with security events and additional measures to protect data transmissions are also parts of the equation.

With Amazon Web Services (AWS) becoming the go-to ecosystem for cloud implementation for many businesses who want to scale, security is a necessity rather than an option. This is also the reason why one of the AWS Well-Architected Framework’s five pillars—the second pillar, to be exact—is security. For the environment and systems it hosts to be completely secure, there are several design principles to follow to expand your chances of achieving a truly well-architected system.

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The First Pillar Of The AWS Well-Architected Framework: Operational Excellence

Every software system is built to serve a specific purpose and to achieve clear objectives for a business. Everything from the design of a system to the infrastructure supporting it needs to be geared towards those collective objectives. In many ways, the way a system is designed mimics how buildings are structured: integrity and functionality are two inseparable elements that make both a structure and a system perform the best way possible to realize their intention.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) serves as the perfect foundation for a well-designed system, but in order for AWS to serve its purpose as a cloud platform designed to provide the optimal cost-effective and secure environment for its customers, it needs to be well-architected.

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Getting Started With Amazon’s New Well-Architected Tool

On the 29th November 2018, Amazon introduced the Well-Architected tool. With the help of this tool, AWS users can access their planned architectures vis-a-vis the latest AWS architecture best practices. In addition, AWS users can get guidance on improving their present application architectures. This tool is based on the increasingly popular Well-Architected framework which helps users build secure, high performance, resilient, and efficient AWS-based solutions. This tool provides a consistent approach for users to evaluate planned and existing architectures and provides guidance to help implement designs that scale in accordance with application needs.

Importantly, with the help of this tool users get insights on potential security risks and identify steps to address these risks via the Well-Architected framework. The tool guides the user through a series of question and answers covering different aspects of the five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected framework (namely, operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization) and at the end gives you a set of recommendations for the architecture. The Well-Architected tool is freely available to all users but is only available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland).