Using a well-architected framework—in Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure—is a key part of operating well within the cloud. But what is a well-architected framework? It’s merely a set of guidelines that allows you to establish a fully functioning, secure, efficient, cost-optimized architecture within the cloud. AWS’ well architected framework offers a lot of versatility, control, and guidance for building your organizations architectures in the cloud. Whether you want to test your designs before rolling them out or optimize existing designs/implementations, following the tenets of the well-architected framework can work for you. Here are five reasons to use these guidelines for building your company’s architecture.
Easy Implementation
The well architected framework (WAF) is an interesting set of concepts. It exists within the framework of six different pillars and consists of plenty of design principles for creating a strong foundation as well as effective architecture for the cloud. These six different pillars are incredibly important when it comes to building your designs. Operational Excellence, Security, Sustainability, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization. Each of these has its own comprehensive guide and principles that are easy to follow and implement. Understanding each of the pillars gives you the agency to design your architecture around them. It’s like signing up for a new insurance policy. You wouldn’t just jump into signing up for the first type of vehicle or disability insurance you can find. You need to spend some time researching and understanding how everything works together to create a fully functioning, ideal framework for your cloud programs—and the guidelines of the well architected framework are perfect for helping you accomplish just that.
Fast Deployments
Both AWS and Microsoft Azure have guidelines for well architected frameworks. But, diving a little deeper into them will demonstrate that they operate on the same principles. Both of them offer fast deployments and testing within the pillar of operational excellence. Take the concept of operational excellence. Here, that refers to any operations, processes or anything else that keeps your application running. Your deployments have to be fast, reliable, predictable, and usable. Operational excellence is the pillar that helps you control this. By automating your deployments it reduces the chance of human error modeling things up. This can work to your advantage by preventing bogging down or other unexpected occurrences as you implement new features or fix bugs in your program. As you update your software or platform, holding fast to the standards of operational excellence becomes increasingly important. Monitoring, keeping track of operations, and implementing design best practices (such as gateway routing/off-loading and ambassador services) mean you can maintain operational excellence across every deployment, every time.
Secure
The security pillar of the well-architected framework is perhaps the most important and robust of the five pillars. Some of the core tenets of the security pillar actually take a very common sense approach. Using identity and access management is also important to configure your cloud. It’s also essential to avoid misconfiguration within your cloud. Monitoring and traceability are essential in the security pillar. You need to enable logging metrics throughout the entire infrastructure so that you can audit them and know who’s accessing your systems. Security layers should be thorough and multiple, with plenty of options for defending your infrastructure across the network and any storage. Automation can help because it takes a lot of the guesswork out of it as well as limits the number of users interfering/interacting with the infrastructure. Protecting your data at rest is also essential and can be accomplished through encryption for access control. Finally, being prepared for eventual security issues and having a response plan is going to help you in the long run. It’s better to be prepared than to scramble for recovery. Attack detection, protecting data while on transit, and fast incident response are all crucial to security within a well architected framework.
Reliable and Efficient
Standards are important because they inherently reduce risk. Risk can be a big problem with poor design. Understanding the performance excellence and reliability pillars can come in handy here. Optimizing performance means utilizing technology in unique and streamlined ways. This could be as simple as using a serverless deployment or experimenting with infrastructure and configurations. Reliability means that you should know what the capacity of your programs are and that they should be insulated from unexpected failure. Programs should be scalable and possibly use multiple virtual machines to prevent denial of service issues should the conditions for them arise. In the event that failure does occur, regrouping and recovering from that failure should be baked into the pillar design. Using a handy well-architected framework guide to improve both performance excellence and reliability can help you build the architecture you want for optimal performance.
Cost Improvement
Perhaps the most significant benefit outside of security of using the WAF is improving costs across the organization. You’re saving money and running as efficiently as possible at the lowest cost through the cost optimization pillar. Using cost-effective resources during planning and deployment can contribute positively to this pillar. While it is a challenging thing at the best of times, finding ways to reduce costs and optimize your workload is a core ideal of any we’ll architected framework at your organization.
