In this blog, I have discussed 6 Pillars of AWS Well-Architected Framework and their design principles.
These 6 pillars are the deciding factor that makes applications and workloads truly well architected. It seems simple and not important but trusts me this is what separates an expert from the rest.
6 Pillars of AWS Well-Architected Framework are as follows:
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What Does Well-Architected Mean?
Essentially, a well-architected framework is a concept of designing and architecting cloud infrastructure for high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads.
It must be done in such a way, it achieves the desired business use case and technical outcomes, all while optimizing costs.
Why are AWS Architectural Frameworks Necessary?
These pillars allow the architect to evaluate the infrastructure at hand, thereby allowing the Cloud to be utterly compliant while making use of the best practices at hand.
It took AWS Solutions Architects several years and experience to identify a set of best practices for architecting in AWS. Thus they designed the five pillars, finely tuned keeping in mind the underlying purpose of AWS: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability.
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Let’s discuss one by one what each pillar dictates:
1. Operational Excellence
Operational Excellence is the first pillar of AWS Well-Architected Framework, it includes the ability to support the development and run workloads effectively while gaining insight into operations, and continuously improving processes and procedures to deliver business value.
You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Operational Excellence Pillar whitepaper.
Design Principles
There are five design principles for operational excellence in the cloud:
- Perform operations as code: Limit human error and enable consistent responses to events.
- Make frequent, small, reversible changes: Make changes in small increments that can be reversed if they fail.
- Refine operations procedures frequently: As workload evolves, procedures should evolve along.
- Anticipate failure: Test on failure scenarios and identify potential sources of failure.
- Learn from all operational failures: Learn from all operation event that fails and share across with the entire team.
Also, Read Our Previous Blog On Blue-Green Deployment.
2. Security
Security on the cloud is a big concern for everyone on the cloud. Infrastructure should be designed such that it serves complete data protection while maintaining privileges to all AWS accounts, infrastructure protection, and identifying any security breach with Detective Controls.
You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Security Pillar whitepaper.
Design Principles
There are seven design principles for security in the cloud:
- Implement a strong identity foundation: Provide the least required permission and enforce separation of duties through.
- Enable traceability: Monitor, alert, and audit actions.
- Apply security at all layers: Utilize multiple security controls.
- Automate security best practices: Automated security mechanisms to improve security and scale more rapidly and cost-effectively.
- Protect data in transit and at rest: Segregate data into sensitivity levels and use encryption, tokenization, and access control for data protection.
- Keep people away from data: Eliminate the need for direct access or manual processing of data.
- Prepare for security events: Create incident management and investigation policy.
Also Check: Our Blog post on AWS Secrets Manager
3. Reliability
Reliability is the third pillar of 6 Pillars of AWS Well-Architected Framework, it encompasses the ability of a workload to successfully complete and consistently has linear performance when it’s expected to. This includes operating and testing the workload through its total lifecycle.
You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Reliability Pillar whitepaper.
Design Principles
There are five design principles for reliability in the cloud:
- Automatically failure recovery: Use key performance indicators (KPIs) to automate trigger a certain action when a threshold is breached.
- Test recovery procedures: Use automation to simulate different failures and test recovery procedures.
- Scale horizontally to increase aggregate workload availability: (Distribute requests across multiple, smaller resources to reduce failure this can be achieved using an Elastic Load balancer.
- Stop guessing capacity: Auto Scaling to automate the addition or removal of resources.
- Manage change in automation: Changes to the infrastructure should be made using automation.
Check Out: Our Blog post on AWS SNS
4. Performance Efficiency
Performance Efficiency fourth pillar of AWS Well-Architected Framework, it includes the ability to use compute resources in an efficient manner while maintaining performance with changing workloads. It requires continuous monitoring to ensure that you are aware of how the workload changes. What trade-offs must be made while architecting to improve performance efficiency?
You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Performance Efficiency Pillar whitepaper.
Design Principles
There are five design principles for performance efficiency in the cloud:
- Democratize advanced technologies: Delegating complex tasks to your cloud vendor.
- Go global in minutes: Deploy your workload in multiple AWS Regions.
- Use serverless architectures: remove the need for you to run and maintain physical servers for traditional compute activities.
- Experiment more often: Carry out comparative testing using different types of instances, storage, or configurations.
- Consider mechanical sympathy: Use the technology approach that aligns best with your workload.
Also Check: Our Blog on AWS Storage
5. Cost Optimization
The Cost Optimization pillar fifth pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, it includes the ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point.
You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Cost Optimization Pillar whitepaper.
Design Principles
There are five design principles for cost optimization in the cloud:
- Implement cloud financial management: Utilize Cloud Financial Management /Cost Optimization to become a cost-efficient organization.
- Adopt a consumption model: Pay only for the resources that you use, and increase or decrease resources depending on business requirements.
- Measure overall efficiency: Monitor to know the gains you make from increasing output and reducing costs.
- Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting: AWS Manages data center operations like racking, stacking, and powering the server.
- Analyze and attribute expenditure: Accurately identify the usage and cost of systems. This provides transparent attribution of IT costs to individual workload owners
6. Sustainability
The sustainability discipline considers your company’s long-term environmental, economic, and societal impact.
You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Sustainability Pillar whitepaper.
Design Principles
There are six design principles for cloud sustainability:
- Recognize your influence
- Set goals for long-term sustainability.
- Increase utilization
- Expect and implement new, more efficient hardware and software offerings.
- Make use of managed services.
- Reduce the aftereffects of your cloud workloads.
Summary
The 6 Pillars of AWS Well-Architected Framework provide architectural best practices to run a workload or application without having any bottlenecks and faults while gaining efficiency. Six pillars of architecture have been created by experts after gaining insight into thousands of scenarios.
Using these frameworks in your architecture will help you architect stable and efficient systems.
Stay tuned for my future blogs where we will deep-dive into Services that an AWS Solution Architect SAA-C03 must know.
Related Links/References
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-CO3
- Overview of Amazon Web Services & Concepts
- AWS Storage: Overview, Types & Benefits
- AWS Elastic Load Balancing: Overview And Types
- Creating AWS Elastic Compute Cloud EC2 Instance
- AWS Management Console Walkthrough
Next Task For You
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