AWS Well-Architected Framework and Review: best practices to boost your business in the cloud

Amazon Web Services is a leading cloud provider with a 32% market share. One of the reasons for this success is that AWS offers clients different tools and services to help create the best cloud-based systems for their business needs.

For example, to help businesses make the most out of its services, AWS designed a Well-Architected Framework. It assists in building secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for various applications and workloads.

Let’s look closer at this framework and its components and define how your business can benefit from it.

What is AWS Well-Architected?

AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of best practices, design principles, and guidelines to ensure that your cloud infrastructure helps you achieve business goals.

There is an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review, or WAFR, for that purpose. It is a systematic review of the cloud infrastructure to help you determine the areas for improvement to align with the framework.

Both framework and review are based on six pillars, each covering a specific area. Let’s discover them.

The six pillars

Security Pillar

This pillar ensures the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data and applications in the cloud. It covers network security, access management, data encryption, threat detection and response, and implementing controls for detecting security events.

Reliability Pillar

This pillar is responsible for workloads: they must be highly available and perform intended functions. It also ensures that your cloud-based systems can recover quickly in case of a failure to satisfy demands. It includes distributed system design, recovery planning, and adapting to changing requirements.

Performance Efficiency Pillar

The Performance Efficiency pillar focuses on optimizing the cost and performance of your cloud-based systems. It covers selecting suitable instance types, optimizing storage and database performance, and using caching and content delivery networks (CDNs) to improve application performance.

Cost Optimization Pillar

The Cost Optimization pillar focuses on reducing costs. Key topics include:

• Understanding spending over time
• Choosing the proper type and quantity of resources
• Scaling without overspending
• Implementing cost-saving measures.

Operational Excellence Pillar

This pillar is about enhancing the efficiency of your cloud-based systems by automating changes, monitoring your systems, and continuously improving processes and procedures.

Sustainability Pillar

The Sustainability pillar concentrates on how businesses can be responsible and positively contribute to the environment, economy, and society. It helps companies to understand their impact and set sustainability goals.

What’s in it for your business?

Industry changes rapidly: new standards and best practices appear, as well as new challenges and threats. Even the most secure and high-performing systems have to stay up with updates.

AWS regularly upgrades the WAFR, so it can help you to achieve it. Also, there is a point not just to conduct the review once, but to perform it systematically. With the review, you’ll be able to:

• Keep up to date with the framework’s best practices
• Determine and monitor any issues to find better solutions to possible future problems
• Identify the unnecessary costs of cloud infrastructure; allocate costs wisely to reduce them
• Optimize and improve the reliability and performance of your systems
• Get insights about security and enhance it so you will be more prepared for different security threats
• Lower the effort for operation and maintenance

If these benefits sound like a good deal for you, let’s focus on the WAFR process.

The review process: what to know

You should conduct the review every 6 to 12 months. The assessments should concentrate on critical AWS workloads for your business operations and functions. It involves supply chain and logistics, inventory management systems, payment gateways, and more.

And there are two options to organize it:

• You can do it by yourself for free with the AWS Well-Architected Tool. But remember that AWS’s underlying technologies are complex. So, if you need help performing it correctly, another option exists.
• Ask an AWS Well-Architected Partner to review your systems. AWS WA Partners have comprehensive training on the framework, so they have the expertise to implement best practices, measure workload states, and make improvements where required.

We are an AWS Well-Architected Partner, so we can conduct the review for your business and help to implement the best practices to improve it. You can reach us via contact@dedicatted.com for consultation and further cooperation.

If you choose to move with the second option with Dedicatted. It includes:

• initial review
• all reports and documentation preparation
• remediation of high-risk issues
• applying for credits

And as a result, you’ll get $5000 of Amazon credits. So in the end, you’ll improve your cloud systems and get $5000 AWS Credits on your AWS needs.

The AWS WA Review with Dedicatted consists of 5 stages:

1. Initial review. We start with a kick-off meeting to identify your expectations and learn more about your business goals and needs.
2. The review. It’s a long call with your technical team to assess the identified areas. Together, we answer the questions in the Well-Architected Framework Tool.
3. Findings and reports. At this stage, we present them to you. We offer an improvement plan that highlights high-risk issues that should be addressed.
4. Remediation. We help you remediate the selected high-risks issues, either via IaC, manual changes, or by providing detailed instructions. 
5. Final. You receives a credit code from AWS for 5000$.

This process will take approximately one month. After that, when you feel the need, you can conduct another review to develop continuously.

Conclusion

AWS Well-Architected provides a complex approach to evaluate architectures and implement designs that can scale over time.

With the best AWS Well-Architected practices, your business can enhance the security, reliability, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of your cloud-based systems.

AWS Well-Architected Framework is a good help for small businesses and startups. With it, you can optimize costs and IT infrastructure to maximize the outcomes of your investments. But also, it could be useful for large businesses to monitor and cut unused resources and avoid overspending.

If you are interested in taking advantage of this opportunity — contact us via contact@dedicatted.com for consultation.