Module 9: Cloud Architecture

Module objectives

• Describe the AWS Well-Architected Framework, including the six pillars

• Identify the design principles of the AWS Well-Architected Framework

• Explain the importance of reliability and high availability

• Identify how AWS Trusted Advisor helps customers

• Interpret AWS Trusted Advisor recommendations

Section 1: AWS Well-Architected Framework

What is the AWS Well-Architected Framework?

• A guide for designing infrastructures that are:

  • Secure

  • High-performing

  • Resilient

  • Efficient

• A consistent approach to evaluating and implementing cloud architectures

• A way to provide best practices that were developed through lessons learned by reviewing customer architectures

Operational Excellence pillar – deliver business value

• Focus

  • Run and monitor systems to deliver business value, and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures.

• Key topics

  • Automating changes

  • Responding to events

  • Defining standards to manage daily operations

Operational excellence design principles

• Perform operations as code

• Make frequent, small, reversible changes

• Refine operations procedures frequently

• Anticipate failure

• Learn from all operational events and failures

Operational excellence questions

• Organization

  • How do you determine what your priorities are?

  • How do you structure your organization to support your business outcomes?

  • How does your organizational culture support your business outcomes?

• Prepare

  • How do you design your workload so that you can understand its state?

  • How do you reduce defects, ease remediation, and improve flow into production?

  • How do you mitigate deployment risks?

  • How do you know that you are ready to support a workload?

Operate

• How do you understand the health of your workload?

• How do you understand the health of your operations?

• How do you manage workload and operations events?

Evolve

• How do you evolve operations?

Security pillar – protect and monitor systems

• Focus

  • Protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies.

• Key topics

  • Protecting confidentiality and integrity of data

  • Identifying and managing who can do what

  • Protecting systems

  • Establishing controls to detect security events

Security design principles

• 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

• Prepare for security events

Security questions

• Security

  • How do you securely operate your workload?

• Identity and access management

  • How do you manage identities for people and machines?

  • How do you manage permissions for people and machines?

• Detection

  • How do you detect and investigate security events?

• Infrastructure protection

  • How do you protect your network resources?

  • How do you protect your compute resources?

• Data protection

  • How do you classify your data?

  • How do you protect your data at rest?

  • How do you protect your data in transit?

• Incident response

  • How do you anticipate, respond to, and recover from incidents?

Reliability pillar – recover from failure and mitigate disruption

• Focus

  • Ensure a workload performs its intended function correctly and consistently when it’s expected to.

• Key topics

  • Designing distributed systems

  • Recovery planning

  • Handling change

Reliability design principles

• Automatically recover from failure

• Test recovery procedures

• Scale horizontally to increase aggregate workload availability

• Stop guessing capacity

• Manage change in automation

Reliability questions

• Foundations

  • How do you manage service quotas and constraints?

  • How do you plan your network topology?

• Workload architecture

  • How do you design your workload service architecture?

  • How do you design interactions in a distributed system to prevent failure?

  • How do you design interactions in a distributed system to mitigate or withstand failures?

• Change management

  • How do you monitor workload resources?

  • How do you design your workload to adapt to changes in demand?

  • How do you implement change?

• Failure management

  • How do you back up data?

  • How do you use fault isolation to protect your workload?

  • How do you design your workload to withstand component failures?

  • How do you test reliability?

  • How do you plan for disaster recovery?

Performance Efficiency pillar – use resources sparingly

• Focus

  • Use IT and computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.

• Key topics

  • Selecting the right resource types and sizes based on workload requirements

  • Monitoring performance

  • Making informed decisions to maintain efficiency as business needs evolve

Performance efficiency design principles

• Democratize advanced technologies

• Go global in minutes

• Use serverless architectures

• Experiment more often

• Consider mechanical sympathy

Performance efficiency questions

• Selection

  • How do you select the best performing architecture?

  • How do you select your compute solution?

  • How do you select your storage solution?

  • How do you select your database solution?

  • How do you configure your networking solution?

• Review

  • How do you evolve your workload to take advantage of new releases?

• Monitoring

  • How do you monitor your resources to ensure they are performing?

• Tradeoffs

  • How do you use tradeoffs to improve performance?

Cost Optimization pillar – eliminate unneeded expense

• Focus

  • Avoid unnecessary costs.

• Key topics

  • Understanding and controlling where money is being spent

  • Selecting the most appropriate and right number of resource types

  • Analyzing spend over time

  • Scaling to meeting business needs without overspending

Cost optimization design principles

• Implement Cloud Financial Management

• Adopt a consumption model

• Measure overall efficiency

• Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting

• Analyze and attribute expenditure

Cost optimization questions

• Practice cloud financial management

  • How do you implement cloud financial management?

• Expenditure and usage awareness

  • How do you govern usage?

  • How do you monitor usage and cost?

  • How do you decommission resources?

• Cost-effective resources

  • How do you evaluate cost when you select services?

  • How do you meet cost targets when you select resource type, size, and number?

  • How do you use pricing models to reduce cost?

  • How do you plan for data transfer changes?

• Manage demand and supply resources

  • How do you manage demand and supply resources?

• Optimize over time

  • How do you evaluate new services?

The AWS Well-Architected Tool

• Helps you review the state of your workloads and compares them to the latest AWS architectural best practices

• Gives you access to knowledge and best practices used by AWS architects, whenever you need it

• Delivers an action plan with step-by-step guidance on how to build better workloads for the cloud

• Provides a consistent process for you to review and measure your cloud architectures

Section 1 key takeaways

• The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides a consistent approach to evaluate cloud architectures and guidance to help implement designs.

• The AWS Well-Architected Framework documents a set of design principles and best practices that enable you to understand if a specific architecture aligns well with cloud best practices.

• The AWS Well-Architected Framework is organized into six pillars.

• Each pillar includes its own set of design principles and best practices.

Section 2: Reliability and availability

Reliability

• A measure of your system’s ability to provide functionality when desired by the user.

• System includes all system components: hardware, firmware, and software.

• Probability that your entire system will function as intended for a specified period.

• Mean time between failures (MTBF) = total time in service/number of failures

Availability

• Normal operation time / total time

• A percentage of uptime (for example, 99.9 percent) over time (for example, 1 year)

• Number of 9s – Five 9s means 99.999 percent availability

High availability

• System can withstand some measure of degradation while still remaining available.

• Downtime is minimized.

• Minimal human intervention is required.

Availability tiers

Factors that influence availability

• Fault tolerance

  • The built-in redundancy of an application's components and its ability to remain operational.

• Scalability

  • The ability of an application to accommodate increases in capacity needs without changing design.

• Recoverability

  • The process, policies, and procedures that are related to restoring service after a catastrophic event.

Section 2 key takeaways

• Reliability is a measure of your system’s ability to provide functionality when desired by the user, and it can be measured in terms of MTBF.

• Availability is the percentage of time that a system is operating normally or correctly performing the operations expected of it (or normal operation time over total time).

• Three factors that influence the availability of your applications are fault tolerance, scalability, and recoverability.

• You can design your workloads and applications to be highly available, but there is a cost tradeoff to consider.

Section 3: AWS Trusted Advisor

AWS Trusted Advisor

• Online tool that provides real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices.

• Looks at your entire AWS environment and gives you real-time recommendations in five categories.

Section 3 key takeaways

• AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides real-time guidance to help you provision your resources by following AWS best practices.

• AWS Trusted Advisor looks at your entire AWS environment and gives you real-time recommendations in five categories.

• You can use AWS Trusted Advisor to help you optimize your AWS environment as soon as you start implementing your architecture designs.

Summary

• Describe the AWS Well-Architected Framework, including the six pillars

• Identify the design principles of the AWS Well-Architected Framework

• Explain the importance of reliability and high availability

• Identify how AWS Trusted Advisor helps customers

• Interpret AWS Trusted Advisor recommendations