AWS Well Architected Framework

When I was learning AWS WAF, I took some notes. I think it may be useful to share them.

The pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework

Operational Excellence

The ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures.

Prepare

• Infra as Code
• NFRs
• Cost
• Monitoring, Event logging

Operate

• Monitoring, Event logging
• Runbooks, Playbooks, Prioritisation on Incident management
• Automation

Evolve

• Dedicate time for evolutions
• Identify and Prioritise Infra and process improvements
• Leverage data and feedback loops

AWS Services: AWS X-Ray, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and VPC Flow Logs, AWS Config, CloudFormation, Elastic Search

Security

The ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies.

• Identity and Access Management
• Detective Controls: Monitoring, logs
• Infrastructure Protection: Multiple layers of defense, AMI images hardening
• Data Protection: Classification, encryption, log audit trail for changes and access
• Incident Response: Isolate instances, Automate with triggers when possible, prepare procedures

AWS Services: IAM, GuardDuty, S3 for log history, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, Config, VPC, AWS Shield, WAF (web app firewall), RDS, KMS, Cloudwatch, AWS Lambda (triggers), Cloud formations (for clean room)

Reliability

The ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues.

Foundations

• Service limits
• Network topology

Change Management

• Monitor and Automate

Failure Management

• Failure => replace the failed resource with and new one and analyse later

Backup automation

Chaos testing

AWS Services: CloudTrail, CloudWatch, CloudFormations, KMS, S3

Performance Efficiency

The ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.

• Selection

• Review

• Monitoring

• Tradeoffs

Cost Optimization

The ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point.

In the AWS Well-Architected Framework we use these terms:

Expenditure Awareness

Cost-Effective Resources

Matching supply and demand

Optimizing Over Time