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Well-Architected Framework

  • Well-architected framework is a set of principles.
  • These principles are documented as 5 pillars:
    • Operational Excellence
    • Security
    • Cost Optimization
    • Reliability
    • Performance Efficiency

General Design Principles

  • Stop guessing capacity needs - scale up and down as required
  • Automate everything - automated systems ensure consistency and reliability.
  • Test at scale - test an accurate replica of production on-demand.
  • Adapt and evolve - adapt the architecture as needed to meet new challenges.
  • Be data driven - drive decisions through data.
  • Game days - practice, practice, practice.

The Five Pillars

  • Operational Excellence
    • Does your architecture work? Will it continue to work?
    • There are six design principles for operational excellence in the cloud:
      • Perform operations as code
      • Annotate documentation
      • Make frequent, small, reversible changes
      • Refine operations procedures frequently
      • Anticipate failure
      • Learn from all operational failures (and success)
    • Prioritize to align with business priorities
      • What is the business goal?
      • What are the critical pieces needed to meet that goal?
      • Any compliance restrictions/requirements?
      • Dependencies between services?
    • Design your architecture to support business priorities
      • Is the design observable?
      • Is the entire design code? Can it be redeployed in even of a failure?
      • Are your logs and observations actionable? Can you derive values from data you're collecting?
    • Is your workload ready to go live
      • Are your processes consistent?
      • Is operational code properly managed?
      • Are tests in place?
      • Are you anticipating failure?
    • Ensure your workloads are actually working
      • Metrics indicate health of each service
      • Metrics show overall health
      • Are you monitoring business metrics too?
    • Responding to events
      • Anticipate planned and unplanned events
      • Respond in code
      • Connect observations with 3rd party tools as needed
    • Learn from success or failure
      • Post-event, have runbooks changed?
      • Are teams evaluating their processes?
      • Test assumptions
      • Experiment early and often to find better solutions
      ​
  • Cost Optimization
    • Spend only what you have to. Deliver business value for the lowest price point.
    • There are five design principles for cost optimization in the cloud:
      • Adopt a consumption model
      • Measure overall efficiency
      • Stop spending money on data center operations
      • Analyze and attribute expenditure
      • Use managed services to reduce cost of ownership
    • Use the appropriate resources and configurations
      • Provision for current needs with an eye to the future
      • "Right size" to lowest resource that meets the needs
      • Use data to choose purchase options
      • Optimize by geography
      • Default to managed services
      • Optimize data transfer
    • Matching supply and demand
    • Know how much you're spending and where
      • Understand your stakeholders
      • Implement a governance model
      • Attribute cost to teams/projects
      • Tag AWS resources
      • Track lifecycle of the resources
    • Continuously work to maximize value delivered
      • Align utilization with requirements
      • Report and validate findings
      • Evaluate new services for value
      • Continue push for managed services, if they're cost-effective
      ​
  • Reliability
    • There are five design principles for reliability in the cloud:
      • Test recovery procedures
      • Automatically recover from failure
      • Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability
      • Stop guessing capacity, reduce idle resources
      • Manage change in automation
    • Will this system work consistently and recover quickly
      • Recover from issues automatically
      • Scale horizontally first for resiliency
      • Reduce idle resources
      • Manage change through automation
    • Understand the default and requested limits
      • Are you planning beyond current limits for a resource?
      • Will you scale past specific resource limits?
      • Can those limits be lifted?
      • Can you plan around those limits?
    • Networking
      • IP address space management (are you considering IPv6)
      • Subnets structures
      • Resilient topologies
      • Ability to handle sudden increase in traffic
      • Provide consistent performance regardless (latency)
    • Ensure your application is ready for business use
      • Can users access your application?
      • Deploy without an issue
      • Can you push issue to a planned downtime?
      • Can your application withstand partial outages?
      ​
  • Performance Efficiency
    • There are five design principles for performance efficiency in the cloud:
      • Democratize advanced technologies
      • Go global in minutes
      • Use serverless architectures
      • Experiment more often
      • Mechanical sympathy
    • Remove bottlenecks, reduce waste
      • Let AWS do the work whenever possible
      • Reduce latency through regions and AWS Edge
      • Serverless whenever possible, then containers, only then fall down to instances
      • Experiment as new services are released
      • Think about the user, not your tech stack
    • Is this the optimal solution for this workload
      • What type of compute best suits?
      • Which data store is ideal for this workload?
      • Does your network design complement compute and data store choices?
    • Continuously ensure choices work for your workloads
      • Is infrastructure stored as code?
      • Are deployments simple and automated?
      • Can benchmarks be taken automatically?
      • Does load testing interfere with production?
    • Monitoring
      • Use active and passive monitoring where appropriate
      • Understand the 5 phases of monitoring - generation, aggregation, real-time processing, storage, analytics
      • Create actionable metrics
      ​
  • Security
    • There are six design principles for security in the cloud:
      • Implement a strong identity foundation
      • Enable traceability
      • Apply security at all layers
      • Automate security best practices
      • Protect data in transit and at rest
      • Prepare for security events
    • Does this system work only as intended?
      • Identities have the least privileges required
      • Know who did what and when
      • Security is woven into the fabric of the system
      • Automate security tasks
      • Encrypt all data at rest and in transit
      • Prepare for the worst
    • Look for abnormal behavior in your logs
      • Capture and analyze logs
      • Regularly audit controls and configurations (AWS CloudFormation drift, AWS Config)
    • Defense in depth
      • Establish trust boundaries
      • Protect the network in/out
      • Protect all hosts
      • Configure services to meet security posture needs
      • Enforce service level protection
    • Classify and protect data
      • How sensitive is the data?
      • Who should have access to the data and when?
      • Encrypt in transit and at rest
      • Backup your data, test backups
    • Contain and recover from an unplanned event
      • Do you have a plan to tag affected resources?
      • Can you adjust permissions to allow for containment?
      • Can you redeploy to recover quickly?
      • Did you learn from the incident and adjust?
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