Being well-architected - AMS Advanced Application Developer's Guide

Being well-architected

At AWS we believe that well-architected systems greatly increase the likelihood of business success. The AWS Architecture Center provides expert guidance on architecting in the AWS Cloud.

We recommend the following articles and whitepapers to help you understand the pros and cons of the decisions you must make while building systems on AWS.

Are You Well-Architected?: Introduces the AWS Well-Architected Framework, based around six pillars:

  • Operational excellence: The operational excellence pillar focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business value, and continually improving processes and procedures. Key topics include managing and automating changes, responding to events, and defining standards to successfully manage daily operations.

  • Security: The security pillar focuses on protecting information and systems. Key topics include confidentiality and integrity of data, identifying and managing who can do what with permissions management, protecting systems, and establishing controls to detect security events.

  • Reliability: The reliability pillar focuses on the ability to prevent, and quickly recover from failures to meet business and customer demand. Key topics include foundational elements around setup, cross project requirements, recovery planning, and how we handle change.

  • Performance efficiency: The performance efficiency pillar focuses on using IT and computing resources efficiently. Key topics include selecting the right resource types and sizes based on workload requirements, monitoring performance, and making informed decisions to maintain efficiency as business needs evolve.

  • Cost optimization: The cost optimization pillar focuses on avoiding unneeded costs. Key topics include understanding and controlling where money is being spent, selecting the most appropriate and right number of resource types, analyzing spend over time, and scaling to meet business needs without overspending.

  • Sustainability: The sustainability pillar focuses on the ability to continually improve sustainability impacts by reducing energy consumption and increasing efficiency across all components of a workload by maximizing the benefits from the provisioned resources and minimizing the total resources required.

AWS Well-Architected Framework: Describes how AWS enables customers to assess and improve their cloud-based architectures and better understand the business impact of their design decisions. It addresses general design principles as well as specific best practices and guidance in six conceptual areas that AWS defines as the pillars of the Well-Architected Framework.