Well Architected Framework

Question 1

Well Architected Framework
General Guiding Principles

Answer 1

• Stop guessing your capacity needs
• Test systems at production scale
• Automate to make architectural experimentation easier
• Allow for evolutionary architectures
  
  • Design based on changing requirements
• Drive architectures using data
• Improve through game days
  
  • Simulate applications for flash sale days

Question 2

AWS Cloud Best Practices
Design Principles

Answer 2

• Scalability: vertical & horizontal
• Disposable Resources: servers should be disposable & easily configured
• Automation: Serverless, Infrastructure as a Service, Auto Scaling…
• Loose Coupling:
  
  • Monolith are applications that do more and more over time, become bigger
  • Break it down into smaller, loosely coupled components
  • A change or a failure in one component should not cascade to other components
• Services, not Servers:
  
  • Don’t use just EC2
  • Use managed services, databases, serverless, etc!

Question 3

Well Architected Framework
6 Pillars

Answer 3

1) Operational Excellence
2) Security
3) Reliability
4) Performance Efficiency
5) Cost Optimization
6) Sustainability

They are not something to balance, or trade-offs, they’re a synergy

Question 4

1) Operational Excellence

Answer 4

• Includes the ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures
• Design Principles
  
  • Perform operations as code - Infrastructure as code
  • Annotate documentation - Automate the creation of annotated documentation after every build
    * Make frequent, small, reversible changes - So that in case of any failure, you can reverse it
    * Refine operations procedures frequently - And ensure that team members are familiar with it
    * Anticipate failure
    * Learn from all operational failures
• Operational Excellence AWS Services:
  
  • Prepare: AWS CloudFormation. AWS Config
  • Operate: AWS CloudFormation. AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray
  • Evolve: AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodePipeline

Question 5

2) Security

Answer 5

• Includes the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies
• Design Principles
  
  • Implement a strong identity foundation - Centralize privilege management and reduce (or even eliminate) reliance on long-term credentials - Principle of least privilege - IAM
  • Enable traceability - Integrate logs and metrics with systems to automatically respond and take action
  • Apply security at all layers - Like edge network, VPC, subnet, load balancer, every instance, operating system, and application
  • Automate security best practices
  • Protect data in transit and at rest - Encryption, tokenization, and access control
  • Keep people away from data - Reduce or eliminate the need for direct access or manual processing of data
  • Prepare for security events - Run incident response simulations and use tools with automation to increase your speed for detection, investigation, and recovery
  • Shared Responsibility Model
• Security AWS Services
  
  • Identity and Access Management: IAM, AWS-STS, MFA token, AWS Organizations
    
    • Detective Controls: AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch
    • Infrastructure Protection: Amazon CloudFront, Amazon VPC, AWS Shield ,AWS WAF, Amazon Inspector
    • Data Protection: KMS, S3, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon EBS, Amazon RDS
    • Incident Response: IAM, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon CloudWatch Events

Question 6

3) Reliability

Answer 6

• Ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions,
  dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate
  disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues
• Design Principles
  
  • Test recovery procedures - Use automation to simulate different failures or to recreate scenarios that led to failures before
  • Automatically recover from failure - Anticipate and remediate failures before they occur
  • Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability - Distribute requests across multiple, smaller resources to ensure that they don’t share a common point of failure
  • Stop guessing capacity - Maintain the optimal level to satisfy demand without over or under provisioning - Use Auto Scaling
  • Manage change in automation - Use automation to make changes to infrastructure
• Reliability AWS Services
  * Foundations (IAM, Amazon VPC, Service Quotas, AWS Trusted Advisor)
  * Change Management (AWS Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config)
  * Failure Management (Backups, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon S3 Glacier, Amazon S3, Amazon Route 53

Question 7

4) Performance Efficiency

Answer 7

• Includes the ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve
• Design Principles
  
  • Democratize advanced technologies - Advance technologies become services and hence you can focus more on product development
  • Go global in minutes - Easy deployment in multiple regions
  • Use serverless architectures - Avoid burden of managing servers
  • Experiment more often - Easy to carry out comparative testing
  • Mechanical sympathy - Be aware of all AWS services
• Performance Efficiency AWS Services
  
  • Selection (AWS Auto Scaling, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), AWS Lambda, Amazon RDS)
  • Review (AWS CloudFormation, AWS News Blog)
  • Monitoring (Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Lambda)
  • Tradeoffs (Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache, AWS Snowball, Amazon CloudFront)

Question 8

5) Cost Optimization

Answer 8

• Includes the ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point
• Design Principles
  
  • Adopt a consumption mode - Pay only for what you use
  • Measure overall efficiency - Use CloudWatch
  • Stop spending money on data center operations - AWS does the infrastructure part and enables customer to focus on organization projects
  • Analyze and attribute expenditure - Accurate identification of system usage and costs, helps measure return on investment (ROI) - Make sure to use tags
  • Use managed and application level services to reduce cost of ownership - As managed services operate at cloud scale, they can offer a lower cost per transaction or service
• Cost OptimizationAWS Services
  * Expenditure Awareness (AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Report, AWS Cost Explorer, Reserved Instance Reporting)
  * Cost-Effective Resources (Spot Instance, Reserved Instance, Amazon S3 Glacier)
  * Matching supply and demand (AWS Auto Scaling, AWS Lambda)
  * Optimizing Over Time (AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Cost and Usage Report)

Question 9

6) Sustainability

Answer 9

• The sustainability pillar focuses on minimizing the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads.
• Design Principles
  
  • Understand your impact – establish performance indicators, evaluate improvements
  • Establish sustainability goals – Set long-term goals for each workload, model return on investment (ROI)
  • Maximize utilization – Right size each workload to maximize the energy efficiency of the underlying hardware and minimize idle resources.
  • Anticipate and adopt new, more efficient hardware and software offerings – and design for flexibility to adopt new technologies over time.
  • Use managed services – Shared services reduce the amount of infrastructure; Managed services help automate sustainability best practices as moving infrequent accessed data to cold storage and adjusting compute capacity.
  • Reduce the downstream impact of your cloud workloads – Reduce the amount of energy or resources required to use your services and reduce the need for your customers to upgrade their devices
• Sustainability AWS Services
  
  • EC2 Auto Scaling, Serverless Offering (Lambda, Fargate)
  • Cost Explorer, AWS Graviton 2, EC2 T instances, @Spot Instances
  • EFS-IA, Amazon S3 Glacier, EBS Cold HDD volumes
  • S3 Lifecycle Configurations, S3 Intelligent Tiering
  • Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager
  • Read Local, Write Global: RDS Read Replicas, Aurora Global DB, DynamoDB Global Table, CloudFront

Question 10

AWS Well-Architected Tool

Answer 10

• Free tool to review your architectures against the 6 pillars Well-Architected Framework and adopt architectural best practices
• How does it work?
• Select your workload and answer questions
• Review your answers against the 6 pillars
• Obtain advice: get videos and documentations, generate a report, see the results in a dashboard
• Let’s have a look: https://console.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected