When building technical solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS), if you ignore the five pillars of operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization, building a system that meets your expectations and requirements can become challenging.
By incorporating these pillars into your architecture, you can create a reliable and efficient system. So you can focus on functional requirements, other aspects of your design.
The AWS WellArchitected framework helps cloud designers build the safest, most powerful, resilient, and most efficient infrastructure possible for their applications. The framework provides a consistent approach that allows customers and AWS Partner Network (APN) partners to evaluate the architecture and implements an extended design over time and according to application requirements. Provides guidelines for doing so.
Operational Excellence
The Operational Excellence Pillar includes improving supporting processes and procedures to support development continuously, perform workloads effectively, gain insight into their operations, and deliver business value. There are prescriptive guidelines for implementing the Operational Excellence Pillars Detail-Doc.
Design Principles
There are five design principles for operational excellence in the cloud:
- Perform operations as code
- Make frequent, small, reversible changes
- Refine operations procedures frequently
- Anticipate failure
- Learn from all operational failures
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Security
The Security Pillar includes the ability to protect data systems and assets and enhance security using cloud technologies. Prescriptive guidance for implementation is provided in the Security Pillar Detail-Doc.
Design Principles
There are seven 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
- Keep people away from data
- Prepare for security events
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Reliability
It contains workload capabilities that consistently and adequately execute their intended functions when expected on the reliability pillar. It includes the ability to operate and test workloads across their lifecycles. Prescriptive guidance for implementation is provided in the Reliability Pillar Detail-Doc.
Design Principles
There are five design principles for reliability in the cloud:
- Automatically recover from failure
- Test recovery procedures
- Scale horizontally to increase aggregate workload availability
- Stop guessing capacity
- Manage change in automation
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Performance Efficiency
Performance Efficiency Pillars include using computing resources to efficiently meet system requirements and maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technology advances. Prescriptive guidance on implementation is in the Performance Efficiency Pillars Detail-Doc.
Design Principles
There are five design principles for performance efficiency in the cloud:
- Democratize advanced technologies
- Go global in minutes
- Use serverless architectures
- Experiment more often
- Consider mechanical sympathy
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Cost Optimization
Pillars of cost optimization include running the system and providing business value at the most affordable price. You can find normative guidance for implementation in the Cost Optimization Pillar Detail-Doc.
Design Principles
There are five design principles for cost optimization in the cloud:
- Implement cloud financial management
- Adopt a consumption model
- Measure overall efficiency
- Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting
- Analyze and attribute expenditure
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