Well Architected Framework

• https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/

5 Pillars

Operational Excellence

• Run and monitor systems to deliver business value

• Continuously improve processes and procedures

• Design Principles

• IaC
• Documentation
• Frequent, small, reversible changes
• Refine operations procedures frequently and ensure the team is familiar with it
• Anticipate failure
• Learn from all operational failures

Security

• Protect information, systems and assets while delivering business value

• Risk assessments and mitigation strategies

• Design Principles

• Implement a strong identity foundation: centralize privileges and reduce long-term credentials - Principle of least privilege
• Enable traceability: integrate logs and metrics with systems
• Apply security at all layers: edge network, vpc, subnet, lb, OS, app
• Automate security best practices
• Protect data in transit and at rest
• Keep people away from data
• Prepare for security events: increase speed for detection, investigation and recovery

Reliability

• System recover from infrastructure or service disruptions

• Dynamically scale to meet demand and mitigate disruptions

• Design Principles

• Test recovery procedures: simulate different failures to recreate scenarios
• Automatically recover from failure: anticipate and remediate failures
• Scale horizontally to aggregate system availability
• Stop guessing capacity: use autoscaling
• Manage change in automation: use automation to make infrastructure

Performance Efficiency

• Use computing resource efficiently

• Maintain that efficiency as demand changes

• Design Principles

• Democratize advanced technologies
• Go global in minutes
• Use serverless architectures
• Experiment more often
• Mechanical sympathy: be aware of all AWS services

Cost Optimization

• Deliver business value at the lowest price

• Design Principles

• Adopt a consumption mode: pay only for what you use
• Measure overall efficiency: use cloudwatch
• Stop spending money on data center operations: move to cloud and stop worrying about infrastructure
• Analyze and attribute expensitures: use tags to track cost of each application
• Use managed and application level services to reduce cost of ownership: prefer serverless

Architecture Use Cases

Stateless Web App

Stateful (E-commerce)

Stateful (Blog)

To Do List Mobile App

Serverless Blogs

Microservices

Distributing paid content

Software Updates Offloading

Big Data Ingestion Pipeline

Lambda, SNS, SQS

S3 Events

Caching Strategies

Network Security

High Performance Computing (HPC)