How do you know if your workloads are properly architected for the cloud? There are lots of factors to consider and work to undertake to ensure a smooth migration.
The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides architectural guidance across the five architectural pillars of operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. Learn to apply AWS best practices to the design and operation of your workloads, identify potential issues in your workload, and receive step-by-step guidance on how to create improvements.
At 0:25 Rodney Lester begins by defining the AWS Well-Architected framework as a guide for developers and architects to design, build, migrate as well as optimizing the workloads to ensure secure, high performing infrastructures of the application and the services.
At 1:28 he lists the benefits of the AWS well-architected framework that included the consistent approach to review the entire architecture, understanding the possible potential impact, to identify and analyze the risks and to use the cloud infrastructure platform efficiently.
At 5:04 Rodney explains the mechanisms of the framework by stating a few points that include making the informed decisions, leaning the efficient best practices, analyzing and reducing the risk in the architecture.
At 5:34 he adds the pillars of the AWS framework to be operational excellence, the security, reliability, cost optimization, and performance efficiency. At 7:27 he emphasizes that reliability matters as much as availability does. He adds that it is necessary to be resilient to failure and to have the disaster recovery implementation tested and ready.
At 11:28 he puts forward the general principles regarding the well-architected framework, that includes the steps such as testing the systems at production scale, automating to make the architectural implementation much easier, having scope for the evolutionary architectures and to drive the framework through the data. At 15:31 he explains the principles to be followed for the operational excellence which includes performing the operations as code, annotating the documentation, anticipation of failures and making the reversible small changes.
Rodney then moves on from the design principles to security at 17:30. He emphasizes the prominent security design principles to be implementing the strong identity foundation, automating the security techniques, protecting the data in the transit as well in rest and enabling the traceability.
At 20:30 he stresses the importance of the reliability characteristic in the workloads well-architected framework. Some of the chief design principles for the reliability are the test recovery procedures, scaling horizontally to increases the aggregate system availability and managing the changes in the automation.
Efficiency has always been a very important characteristic of the well-architected AWS frameworks. At 23:07, he lists the basic design principles for achieving the performance efficiency which includes the usage of the serverless architectures, democratizing the advanced technologies and experimenting more often to achieve the standard results.
Cost optimization is necessary since that helps in obtaining a very standardized cost for the services. At 25:20 he adds on that the design principles necessary for the cost optimization are adopting a consumption model, measuring the overall efficiency, using the managed services to reduce the ownership cost as well spending less on the data center operations.
At 28:04 he explains the steps involved in successfully implementing the well architected framework. The steps include the identification of the sponsor, identifying the significant workloads, discussing the timelines and sources, the business context for review as well as scheduling the entire process. At 29:17 he explains the requirements of the success.
Collaboration is key for a process for resolving the identified issues, preparing and gathering the data before reviewing. At 30:52 he further briefs about the areas of improvement as well as the prioritized list of remediation. Thus, through this insightful talk, Rodney explains the design principles for the architectural pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
