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In 2015, Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), introduced a groundbreaking whitepaper at the annual re:Invent conference, outlining best practices for managing cloud workloads. This paper has since laid the foundational pillars of AWS best practices, drawing on years of collective expertise from professional services teams, product teams, and customer experiences. The result? The AWS Well-Architected Framework, a roadmap for optimizing AWS infrastructures to meet modern demands.
The AWS Well-Architected Review assesses your AWS infrastructure to gauge whether your systems are functioning as per the benchmarks set by AWS. It is a systematic way of comparing existing AWS workloads with standards to discover and fix potential issues in the system.
What is the AWS Well-Architected Review?
The Well-Architected Review identifies and defines architectural best practices for the AWS infrastructure. It evaluates whether your systems are aligned with AWS benchmarks and provides a systematic approach to comparing existing workloads against established standards. By identifying potential issues, this review empowers teams to enhance performance and efficiency.
Today, AWS ecosystems are in a constant state of evolution. Development teams continually adapt and optimize their use of AWS to manage workloads and roll out new applications. However, these changes can inadvertently compromise performance and efficiency. For that reason, organizations must regularly reassess their infrastructures to ensure they remain agile and effective.
The AWS Well-Architected Tool, integrated into the AWS console, facilitates this crucial review. Conducting the review can be done in-house or in collaboration with a certified AWS partner, a strategy that many organizations find advantageous. After identifying the workload for evaluation, the tool assesses it against the six fundamental pillars of the Well-Architected Framework, delivering actionable findings that can drive significant improvements.
Six Fundamental Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Review
You can assess the performance of your infrastructure by evaluating your workloads against the five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Review.
Operational Excellence
The AWS infrastructure empowers businesses to build high-performing, secure, robust, and scalable applications. Operational excellence enables effective management and monitoring of systems that generate value, helping improve elements that support your applications and workloads.
Security
Securing AWS infrastructures is crucial in defending against sophisticated threats. The security pillar equips organizations to protect their systems and assets while delivering value. A significant aspect of this pillar includes conducting risk assessments and implementing mitigation strategies to enhance the security of the AWS environment.
Reliability
The reliability pillar serves as a fail-safe for AWS infrastructure. It evaluates the ability of the infrastructure to recover from disruptions, handle shortfalls in computing resources, and meet rising demand. The goal is to enhance the system's efficiency in addressing major issues and ensuring sustained operational integrity.
Performance Efficiency
Resource allocation poses a complex challenge that businesses encounter periodically. The performance efficiency pillar focuses on optimizing resource utilization based on demand. By streamlining processes, businesses can ensure that resources adapt to changing customer demands and technology advancements.
Cost Optimization
One of the key components for driving business revenue is cost savings. Elevated infrastructure costs can significantly hinder business outcomes and diminish value. The cost optimization pillar helps organizations ensure their systems operate at the lowest possible expense, maximizing financial returns.
Sustainability
The newest pillar, sustainability, emphasizes the importance of environmentally responsible practices in cloud computing. It encourages organizations to adopt strategies that minimize their carbon footprint through efficient resource utilization and renewable energy sources. This pillar helps organizations assess their workloads, optimize energy consumption, and implement practices that contribute to a more sustainable operational model.
Each pillar has specific design principles that the Well-Architected Review tool examines during the assessment. After completing the review, you will receive videos and documents outlining AWS best practices, a summary of the workload review, and a dashboard that encompasses cross-organizational workload evaluations. The insights gained help address issues highlighted in the review report, ultimately enhancing your infrastructure.
Experts in AWS Well-Architected Review
Our experts will meet you and assess your AWS infrastructure when you collaborate with us. We'll walk you through a set of questions in sync with the infrastructure and benchmark your system against the set standard by the AWS Well-Architected Framework. After the review, we’ll share the results with recommendations on what you need to do to improve your infrastructure. The proposals will list as "no changes required," "medium risk," and "high risk identified." The recommendation priority is as per the urgency, with high-impact items highlighted for your attention. Want to get started with your review? Contact us today.
