After years or decades of trusting your on-premise infrastructure, your understanding of cloud tools and best practices may be nebulous at best. The Well-Architected Framework is designed to help clear the fog and ensure you’re operating a reliable and efficient cloud workload. It’s developed by AWS Solutions Architects, who share best practices they’ve identified from their experience designing thousands of solutions in a wide variety of industries. Here's a brief intro to the Framework for those who want to get cirrus about building and maintaining value-driven cloud solutions.
The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a series of questions and documentation organized into five key pillars that guides decision making, alerts you to areas of improvement, and helps you identify how well-aligned your architecture is to best practices. It’s free and can be used at any time and in whatever stage of development you find yourself in. The five pillars are:
- Operational excellence: The topics in this pillar will help you recognize strengths and identify weaknesses in how you deliver value to your users. Processes can always be improved, and AWS monitoring can help you learn how.
- Security: Sharing resources by migrating to the cloud doesn’t mean you’re putting your users’ information at risk. Protecting their data and your system from harm is a priority for AWS. This topic helps you navigate the best practices for protecting information and systems that reside in the cloud.
- Reliability: In today’s fast-paced business world, you need to adapt quickly and responsibly to meet the needs of your users. Outages in your system can impact your users’ trust in you as a business owner. The topics in this pillar help you manage change and reduce risk to ensure a high level of availability.
- Performance Efficiency: This pillar helps you to identify the most efficient methods for managing your IT and computing resources. Scaling to react to application usage and monitoring the performance of your systems allow you to make informed decisions.
- Cost Optimization: A big draw for cloud migrations is to reduce cost and dependency on full time IT resources and bulky on-premise solutions. AWS provides many tiers for their services, and this framework clarifies your options to prevent over- or-under-spending on your IT solutions.
The sky’s the limit when architecting solutions in AWS. With the help of AWS experts, you might just be the world champ of cloud architecture!
