AWS Well Architected review

If you aren’t following AWS’s best practices then whose practices are you following?

The explosive growth of AWS services has unleashed unparalleled opportunities for developing new products and applications with reach into global markets. How are you leveraging them?

As a trained AWS Well Architected partner, we are experts in running Well-Architected Framework Reviews (WAFR) for best practices in building high-performing, scalable solutions supported by the secure, reliable, cost-effective infrastructure of the AWS Cloud.

The Well-Architected Framework Review consists of 6 pillars

Operational Excellence

The operational excellence pillar focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business value, and continually improving processes and procedures. Key topics include automating changes, responding to events, and defining standards to manage daily operations.

Security

The security pillar focuses on protecting information and systems. Key topics include confidentiality and integrity of data, identifying and managing who can do what with privilege management, protecting systems, and establishing controls to detect security events.

Reliability

The reliability pillar focuses on ensuring a workload performs its intended function correctly and consistently when it’s expected to. A resilient workload quickly recovers from failures to meet business and customer demand. Key topics include distributed system design, recovery planning, and how to handle change.

Performance Efficiency

The performance efficiency pillar focuses on using IT and computing resources efficiently. Key topics include selecting the right resource types and sizes based on workload requirements, monitoring performance, and making informed decisions to maintain efficiency as business needs evolve.

Cost Optimization

The cost optimization pillar focuses on avoiding unnecessary costs. Key topics include understanding and controlling where money is being spent, selecting the most appropriate and right number of resource types, analyzing spend over time, and scaling to meet business needs without overspending.

Sustainability

The sustainability pillar focuses on minimising the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads. Key topics include a shared responsibility model for sustainability, maximising resource usage, reducing wastage and minimising the required number of resources. Turning off resources when not required is also a key idea for operating the AWS Cloud sustainably.

We recommend doing a review at least once a year or before a major architectural change.

We have three options to choose from:

An annual review on all 6 Well Architected Pillars.
A quarterly review where we focus on a new pillar every quarter with Cost Optimisation done every quarter.
Ongoing monitoring – this is part of the value add our managed service customers get.

As an AWS Well Architected Partner, we can help you identify the state of your workloads, make improvements and implement best practices, where assistance is required.

We start off by gathering information about your environment and understanding your business goals and objectives. From there, we will go through the review. The review can take anywhere between 2 hours and 1 day depending on the complexity of your environment.

Once we have completed the review, we will present the information to you and go through a remediation strategy. You’ll have the choice of implementing the recommendations yourself or we can provide a scope of work which is catered towards your key pain points, most critical issues and the overall optimisation of your AWS environment.

Remediation is the work required to address an identified risk or issue. The remediation activity can vary. For example, it might be developing something new by re-architecting an application so it can be event driven instead of always being on, saving cost and increasing security. Similarly, it may be a modification to something that already exists like updating a security control to meet the Australian Privacy Principles.

We will undertake the remediation in collaboration with your in-house IT and prioritise the work that needs to be done. We will always focus on high risk critical incidents first as these generally focus on keeping your AWS environment secure.

If remediation activities are recommended you may be eligible for AWS service credits where AWS are prepared to financially assist keeping your environment Well Architected and secure.

CONTACT

Let’s have a chat about a well-architected review of your AWS solution