Well Architecture Framework General Guide Principles

• Stop guessing your capacity needs
• Test systems at production scale
• Automate to make architectural experimentation easier
• Allow for evolutionary architectures
• Design based on changing requirements
  • Drive architectures using data
• Improve through game days
• Simulate applications for flash sale days

Cloud Best Practices - Design Principles

• Scalability: vertical & horizontal
• Disposable Resources: servers should be disposable & easily configured
• Automation: Serverless, Infrastructure as a Service, Auto Scaling...
• Loose Coupling:
  • Monolith are applications that do more and more over time, become bigger
  • Break it down into smaller, loosely coupled components
  • A change or a failure in one component should not cascade to other components
• Services, not Servers:
  • Don't use just EC2
  • Use managed services, databases, serverless, etc !

AWS Well-Architected Framework 6 Pillars

1. Operational Excellence
   • Includes the ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures
   • Design Principles
     • Perform operations as code - Infrastructure as code
     • Make frequent, small, reversible changes - So that in case of any failure, you can reverse it
     • Refine operations procedures frequently - And ensure that team members are familiar with it
     • Anticipate failure
     • Learn from all operational failures
     • Use managed services - to reduce operational burden
     • Implement observability for actionable insights - performance, reliability, cost...
2. Security
   • Includes the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies
   • Design Principles
   • Implement a strong identity toundation - Centralize privilege management and reduce (or ever eliminate) reliance on long-term credentials - Principle of least privilege - IAM
   • Enable traceability - Integrate logs and metrics with systems to automatically respond and take action
   • Apply security at all layers - Like edge network, VPC, subnet, load balancer, every instance operating system, and applicatior
   • Automate security best practices
   • Protect data in transit and at rest - Encryption, tokenization, and access control
   • Keep people away from data - Reduce or eliminate the need for direct access or manual processing of data
   • Prepare for security events - Run incident response simulations and use tools with automation to increase your speed for detection, investigation, and recovery
3. Reliability
   • 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
   • Design Principles
   • Test recovery procedures - Use automation to simulate different failures or to recreate scenarios that led to failures before
   • Automatically recover from failure - Anticipate and remediate failures before they occur
   • Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability - Distribute requests across multiple, smaller resources to ensure that they don't share a common point of failure
   • Stop guessing capacity - Maintain the optimal level to satisfy demand without over or under provisioning - Use Auto Scaling
   • Manage change in automation - Use automation to make changes to infrastructure
4. Performance Efficiency
   • Includes the ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve
   • Design Principles
   • Democratize advanced technologies - Advance technologies become services and hence you can focus more on product development
   • Go global in minutes - Easy deployment in multiple regions
   • Use serverless architectures - Avoid burden of managing servers
   • Experiment more often - Easy to carry out comparative testing
   • Mechanical sympathy - Be aware of all AWS services
5. Cost Optimization
   • Includes the ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point
   • Design Principles
   • Adopt a consumption mode - Pay only for what you use
   • Measure overall efficiency - Use Cloud Watch
   • Stop spending money on data center operations - AWS does the infrastructure part and enables customer to focus on organization projects
   • Analyze and attribute expenditure - Accurate identification of system usage and costs, helps measure return on investment (ROl) - Make sure to use tags
   • Use managed and application level services to reduce cost of ownership - As managed services operate at cloud scale, they can offer a lower cost per transaction or service
6. Sustainability
   • The sustainability pillar focuses on minimizing the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads.
   • Design Principles
   • Understand your impact - establish performance indicators, evaluate improvements
   • Establish sustainability goals - Set long-term goals for each workload, model return on investment (ROI)
   • Maximize utilization - Right size each workload to maximize the energy efficiency of the underlying hardware and minimize idle resources.
   • Anticipate and adopt new and more efficient hardware and software offerings - and design to flexibly adopt new technologies over time
   • Use managed services - Shared services reduce the amount of infrastructure; Managed services o automate sustainability best practices as moving infrequent accessed data to cold storage and adjusting compute capacity
   • Reduce the downstream impact of your cloud workloads - Reduce the amount of energy or resources required to use your services and reduce the need for your customers to upgrade their devices

• They are not something to balance, or trade-offs, they're a synergy