The Well-Architected Framework AWS

Overview

The Well-Architected Framework. The Well-Architected Framework is the document provided by AWS where best practices and lessons learned are documented for all customers to benefit from the collected know-how. It is organized around six pillars which focus on the ideas of Security, Reliability, Operational Excellence, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. There is a general overview document of all six pillars and a separate document focusing on each of these pillars individually.

The Goal

The goal of the Well-Architected Framework is to enable you to assess and improve your AWS architecture implementation by providing a catalog of questions around each of these pillars, where you can perform a discovery process and define fundamental issues that are often neglected in AWS implementations. The idea is to better understand the business impact of design decisions by evaluating your architecture using a consistent set of best practices.

The Framework

The framework is not about implementation details or architectural patterns, but it's a set of questions centered around helping you perform and understanding, and gain clarity in your architectural decisions. The AWS services involved and finally, the references to consult for details.

Definition

In a nutshell, the AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of questions developed by AWS Experts to help you evaluate your architecture and in general ask, how does my infrastructure follow best practices with regards to the following six general categories?

The categories are:

1. The Security pillar speaks to protecting your data and your systems.
2. The Performance Efficiency pillar speaks to using compute resources efficiently while minimizing over-provisioning as utilization fluctuates.
3. The Cost Optimization pillar speaks to eliminating unneeded expenses.
4. The Operational Excellence pillar speaks to running your workloads with enough automation and visibility to gain insights into day-to-day operations and be able to refine procedures.
5. The Sustainability pillar speaks to energy consumption and environmental impact by directly acting on reducing your resource utilization.
6. Lastly, the Reliability pillar speaks to dynamically acquiring compute resources to meet demand. This is done using fleets of EC2 instances configured in an auto-scaling configuration according to your definitions for increasing and decreasing the size of the fleet. Reliability also speaks to Recovery from infrastructure or service failures by implementing enough redundancy, backup, restore, and recovery procedures. It is important to mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations by using as much automation as possible.