Cloud is shaping the future. As cloud computing continues to evolve, designing and running workloads in the cloud is becoming complex. There are numerous issues and challenges that arise with cloud environments. A well thought out cloud strategy can help your organization take advantage of the numerous offerings of the cloud.
These days, almost everyone is in the cloud! — but that doesn’t mean we have figured out how to overcome all the complications of cloud environments.
Following is a list of usual threats and challenges of Cloud Environments:
- Security & Privacy
- Reliability and flexibility
- Cost
- Downtime
- Lack of Resources
- Management of Multi-Cloud Environment
- Interoperability & Portability
Six pillars of success:
AWS Well-Architected Framework is designed to provide high-level industry best practices and guidance to optimize the way our organization builds and maintains our applications in the AWS cloud.
The said framework is based on six pillars of success which provide a consistent method for evaluating and remediating systems and ensuring we get the most from our AWS cloud environment.
Each of the six pillars has:
- Definition
- Design Principles
- Best Practices (grouped into categories)
- White Paper with links to other useful resources, such as, case studies, training, detailed guides
The six pillars are:
• Operational excellence – focus on running and monitoring systems
• Security – focus on protecting information and systems
• Reliability – focus on ensuring a workload performs as it should
• Performance efficiency – focus on efficient use of IT
• Cost optimization – focus on avoiding unnecessary costs
• Sustainability – focus on social and environmental impacts
Incorporating the above-mentioned pillars into our cloud architecture will help us produce stable and efficient systems.
Design Principles:
The well-architected framework has identified a list of design principles to facilitate good design in the cloud.
There are two types of Design Principles:
- General design principles
- Pillar-specific design principles
The following general design principles are applied and repeated throughout all the 6 Pillars:
- Stop guessing your capacity needs
- Test systems at production scale
- Automate to make architectural experimentation easier and dynamic
- Allow for evolutionary architectures to stay agile
- Drive architectures using data to identify the best choices
- Improve through game days (practice more, plan proactively and stay prepared for unknown catastrophes)
Bird’s-eye view of Pillar-Specific Design Principles:
Best Practices & Questions:
The pillars’ design principles, best practices and the assessment questions are well encapsulated in a single place at this AWS website here: https://wa.aws.amazon.com/wat.map.en.html
Everything put together, it looks something like the map illustrated below:
A Map of the AWS Well-Architected Framework (source: AWS)
AWS-WAR Review:
- A Well-Architected Review is designed to be carried out periodically. It is a systematic approach to evaluate AWS architectures and can help identify and fix the potential gaps within the AWS ecosystems.
- It is designed to explore your priorities and to focus attention on the overall architecture of your cloud infrastructure.
- The AWS Well-Architected Review will help call out specific current pain points and issues you may be suffering.
- This program will discuss the approaches towards AWS services that may address the obstacles.
- It is NOT an audit. There are no right or wrong answers. It’s about an exploration of trade-offs and priorities based on the organizational requirements.
How does the AWS-WAR review help?
- Identifies critical issues and prioritizes the solutions to the problems
- Helps to stay updated with any changes in AWS
- Reduces unnecessary expenses associated with cloud infrastructure
- Optimizes the performance of AWS environment
- Helps maintain compliance and good security procedures and practices
Happiest Minds Review Program:
Happiest Minds has taken AWS WAR as one of its cloud offerings and can help kick-start your implementation of this AWS-Well Architected process.
Our Review Program typically includes the following activities:
- ‘X’ hours of consultation either face-to-face or via web conference.
- Attendees – Happiest Minds team, including an AWS-certified solutions architect and a cross-section of client’s internal (business & technology) stakeholders.
- Happiest Minds to share the recommendations based on client’s workload and applications.
- Sharing a prioritized roadmap of short, medium, and long-term goals based on the core Framework pillars.
- Review and recommendbased on mutual agreement and common consensus.
- Perform periodic checks on the assessments to improve from current state and further work on subsequent recommendations.
- Help you optimize your spends and improve productivity.
For further support, please do get in touch with us to know more about the Review Program.
is a Senior Architect & Head of AWS-Opensource practice for Digital Business Solutions at Happiest Minds. He has 17 plus years of experience in the Technology Industry and is a certified AWS Developer. He has played various roles and worked on different open-source technologies during his career. Prior to Happiest Minds, Arthur has worked with livestream (acquired by Vimeo), Aditya Birla Group and Odyssey Technologies. Currently, Arthur works with Practice Team members, CAG, delivery, pre-sales, CoEs, and Geo Sales to help strengthen AWS & Opensource capabilities and enhance AWS partnership at Happiest Minds.
