AWS - Architecting & Ecosystem

Well Architected Framework General Guiding Principles

• 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

AWS Cloud Best Practices - Design Principles

• 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...

Well Architected Framework

6 Pillars

• 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

1 - Operational Excellence

• 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
  • 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
  • Use managed services - to reduce operational burden
  • Implement observability for actionable insights - performance, reliability, cost...

2- Security

• Includes the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessment 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

3- Reliability

• Ability of system to recover from infrastructure or services 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

4- Performance Efficiency

• 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 serves less architecture - Avoid burden of managing servers
  • Experiment more often - Easy to carry out comparative testing
  • Mechanical sympathy - Be aware of all AWS services

5- Cost Optimization

• Includes the ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest prince 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

6- Sustainability

• The sustainability pillar focuses on minimizing the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads.
• Design Principle
  • Understand you impact - establish performance indicators, evaluate improvements
  • Establish sustainability goals - Set long-term goals for each workload, model return on investiment (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