16. AWS Architecting & Ecosystem

What are the general guiding principles of the Well-Architected Framework?

Stop guessing your capacity needs, test systems at production scale, automate to make architectural experimentation easier, allow for evolutionary architectures, drive architectures using data, and improve through game days

What does "allow for evolutionary architectures" mean?

Design based on changing requirements

What does "improve through game days" mean?

Simulate applications for flash sale days

What are the AWS Cloud best practice design principles?

Scalability (vertical & horizontal), disposable resources, automation, loose coupling, and services not servers

What does "disposable resources" mean as a design principle?

Servers should be disposable & easily configured

What does the "automation" design principle involve?

Serverless, Infrastructure as a Service, Auto Scaling

What does "loose coupling" mean?

Monoliths are applications that do more and more over time and become bigger — break them down into smaller, loosely coupled components so a change or failure in one component does not cascade to others

What does "services, not servers" mean?

Don't use just EC2 — use managed services, databases, serverless etc

What are the 6 pillars of the Well-Architected Framework?

Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimisation, and Sustainability

Are the 6 pillars trade-offs to balance?

No — they are not something to balance or trade off, they're a synergy

What is the Operational Excellence pillar?

Includes the ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value, and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures

What are the design principles of Operational Excellence?

Perform operations as code (Infrastructure as Code), make frequent small reversible changes, anticipate failure, learn from all operational failures, use managed services to reduce operational burden, and implement observability for actionable insights (performance, reliability, cost)

Why make frequent, small, reversible changes?

So that in case of any failure, you can reverse it

What is the Security pillar?

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

What are the design principles of the Security pillar?

Implement a strong identity foundation, enable traceability, apply security at all layers, automate security best practices, protect data in transit and at rest, keep people away from data, and prepare for security events

What does "implement a strong identity foundation" mean?

Centralise privilege management and reduce (or even eliminate) reliance on long-term credentials — the principle of least privilege, using IAM

What does "enable traceability" mean?

Integrate logs and metrics with systems to automatically respond and take action

What does "apply security at all layers" mean?

Apply security at the edge network, VPC, subnet, load balancer, every instance, operating system and application

How do you protect data in transit and at rest?

Encryption, tokenisation and access control

What does "keep people away from data" mean?

Reduce or eliminate the need for direct access or manual processing of data

How do you prepare for security events?

Run incident response simulations and use tools with automation to increase your speed for detection, investigation and recovery

What is the Reliability pillar?

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

What are the design principles of the Reliability pillar?

Test recovery procedures, automatically recover from failure, scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability, stop guessing capacity, and manage change in automation

How do you test recovery procedures?

Use automation to simulate different failures or to recreate scenarios that led to failures before

What does "automatically recover from failure" mean?

Anticipate and remediate failures before they occur

Why 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

What does "stop guessing capacity" mean in the Reliability pillar?

Maintain the optimal level to satisfy demand without over or under provisioning — use Auto Scaling

What is the Performance Efficiency pillar?

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

What are the design principles of Performance Efficiency?

Democratise advanced technologies, go global in minutes, use serverless architectures, experiment more often, and mechanical sympathy

What does "democratise advanced technologies" mean?

Advanced technologies become services, so you can focus more on product development

What does "go global in minutes" mean?

Easy deployment in multiple regions

Why use serverless architectures?

To avoid the burden of managing servers

What does "experiment more often" mean?

It is easy to carry out comparative testing

What does "mechanical sympathy" mean?

Be aware of all AWS services

What is the Cost Optimisation pillar?

Includes the ability to run systems that deliver business value at the lowest price point

What are the design principles of Cost Optimisation?

Adopt a consumption model, measure overall efficiency, stop spending money on data center operations, analyse and attribute expenditure, and use managed and application level services to reduce cost of ownership

What does "adopt a consumption model" mean?

Pay only for what you use

How do you measure overall efficiency?

Use CloudWatch

What does "stop spending money on data center operations" mean?

AWS does the infrastructure part and enables the customer to focus on organisation projects

Why analyse and attribute expenditure?

Accurate identification of system usage and costs helps measure return on investment (ROI) — make sure to use tags

Why do managed and application level services reduce cost of ownership?

As managed services operate at cloud scale, they offer a lower cost per transaction or service

What is the Sustainability pillar?

Focuses on minimising the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads

What are the design principles of the Sustainability pillar?

Understand your impact, establish sustainability goals, maximise utilisation, anticipate and adopt new more efficient hardware and software offerings, use managed services, and reduce the downstream impact of your cloud workloads

What does "understand your impact" mean?

Establish performance indicators and evaluate improvements

What does "establish sustainability goals" mean?

Set long-term goals for each workload and model return on investment (ROI)

What does "maximise utilisation" mean?

Right-size each workload to maximise the energy efficiency of the underlying hardware and minimise idle resources

Why adopt new, more efficient hardware and software offerings?

And design for flexibility to adopt new technologies over time

How do managed services help sustainability?

Shared services reduce the amount of infrastructure, and managed services help automate sustainability best practices such as moving infrequently accessed data to cold storage and adjusting compute capacity

What does "reduce the downstream impact of your cloud workloads" mean?

Reduce the amount of energy or resources required to use your services, and reduce the need for your customers to upgrade their devices

What is the AWS Well-Architected Tool?

A free tool to review your architectures against the 6 pillars of the Well-Architected Framework and adopt architectural best practices

How does the Well-Architected Tool work?

Select your workload and answer questions, review your answers against the 6 pillars, and obtain advice — videos and documentation, a generated report, and results in a dashboard

What is the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool?

Track, measure, review, and forecast the carbon emissions generated from your AWS usage — helps you meet your own sustainability goals

What is the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)?

Helps you build and then execute a comprehensive plan for your digital transformation through innovative use of AWS

Who created the AWS CAF and how?

AWS professionals, by taking advantage of AWS best practices and lessons learned from 1000s of customers

What does the AWS CAF identify?

Specific organisational capabilities that underpin successful cloud transformations

What are the six perspectives of the AWS CAF?

Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations

What is the Business Perspective of the CAF?

Helps ensure that your cloud investments accelerate your digital transformation ambitions and business outcomes

What is the People Perspective of the CAF?

Serves as a bridge between technology and business, accelerating the cloud journey to help organisations more rapidly evolve to a culture of continuous growth and learning where change becomes business-as-normal — focusing on culture, organisational structure, leadership and workforce

What is the Governance Perspective of the CAF?

Helps you orchestrate your cloud initiatives while maximising organisational benefits and minimising transformation-related risks

What is the Platform Perspective of the CAF?

Helps you achieve the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your data and cloud workloads

What is the Security Perspective of the CAF?

Helps you achieve the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your data and cloud workspaces

What is the Operations Perspective of the CAF?

Helps you ensure that your cloud services are delivered at a level that meets the needs of your business

What are the four AWS CAF Transformation Domains?

Technology, Process, Organisation, and Product

What is the Technology transformation domain?

Using the cloud to migrate and modernise legacy infrastructure, applications, data and analytics platforms

What is the Process transformation domain?

Digitizing, automating, and optimising your business operations — leveraging new data and analytics platforms to create actionable insights, and using machine learning to improve your customer service experience

What is the Organisation transformation domain?

Reimagining your operating model — organising your teams around products and value streams, and leveraging agile methods to rapidly iterate and evolve

What is the Product transformation domain?

Reimagining your business model by creating new value propositions (products & services) and revenue models

What are the four AWS CAF Transformation Phases?

Envision, Align, Launch, and Scale

What is the Envision phase of the CAF?

Demonstrate how the cloud will accelerate business outcomes by identifying transformation opportunities and creating a foundation for your digital transformation

What is the Align phase of the CAF?

Identify capability gaps across the 6 AWS CAF perspectives, which results in an action plan

What is the Launch phase of the CAF?

Build and deliver pilot initiatives in production and demonstrate incremental business value

What is the Scale phase of the CAF?

Expand pilot initiatives to the desired scale while realising the desired business benefits