Few people would consider building a home, let alone an enterprise office complex, without the help of an architect. The architectural plan defines every aspect of a building from the foundation to the rooftop, and is what contractors use to build a safe, reliable, functional structure.
The same is true for cloud computing environments. It would be foolhardy to migrate to or build a cloud infrastructure without a sound architectural plan. That’s why Amazon developed the AWS Well-Architected Framework (WAF). It’s Amazon’s blueprint for a strong, secure, scalable cloud infrastructure, guiding you through some of the decisions you’ll have to make to ensure that your architecture is robust from top to bottom.
Reaching Your Goals
According to IDG, “Lowering total cost of ownership, replacing on-premise legacy technology and enabling business continuity are the top business goals driving cloud investments.” Computerworld’s Tech Forecast 2017 found that some 90 percent of enterprises are using the cloud to improve business outcomes. This makes sense–the reasons for moving infrastructure to the cloud are more business driven than IT driven. It’s all about lowering operating costs while making your business more nimble.
Usually, flexibility costs money. Not with the cloud. For example, government IT leaders report reducing costs 20-50 percent by migrating operations to AWS’s GovCloud with the added benefits of improved security, compliance and performance. But as Dan Woods of CITO Research writes, “Let’s face it: the cloud is really cool, but learning about the cloud is not the point. You can become a master of the cloud and still not understand how to use it to improve your business.”
“To avoid this mistake,” Woods says, “spend at least as much time understanding the computing workloads that support your business as you do working to understand the cloud.”
A Framework for Success
Hence Amazon’s Well-Architected Framework. It’s a tool to help businesses create a sound cloud strategy by comparing your workload against Amazon’s best practices, and obtain guidance to produce stable and efficient systems so you can focus on functional requirements.
The AWS WAF is built around five “pillars” that form the bedrock for building an AWS infrastructure. Within these pillars are 42 checkpoints that can be used to validate your approach to the cloud. The pillars are:
- Security–no surprise that security is pillar #1, as this is widely seen as a barrier to cloud adoption. Though Capital One CEO Rob Alexander famously said that AWS “enables us to operate more securely in the public cloud than we can even in our own private data centers.” Security involves more than just data protection, however. Topics covered include confidentiality, access control, system-level threat protection, and establishing controls to detect security events.
- Reliability–ensuring availability at peak traffic times (remember when the ACA website was launched and crashed?), the ability to recover from failures, and overall business continuity are discussed in this pillar. Key topics include laying the right foundation at setup, cross project requirements, recovery planning, and change management.
- Performance Efficiency–AWS offers a dizzying array of products and options, many of which reward careful planning with significant financial savings. It’s critical to balance near-term and long-term requirements to select the right resource types and sizes.
- Cost Optimization–Relentless about cutting costs, in July, Amazon announced its 62nd AWS price reduction. At the same time, cloud users report wasting 35 percent of their cloud budget. This pillar helps you select the most appropriate and right number of resources to grow and scale without overspending, and how to identify and retire suboptimal resources.
- Operational Excellence–In the end, it’s all about business value, which comes from improving business operations. This pillar focuses on managing and automating changes and growth, defining goals and metrics, optimizing operations and defining business standards.
Aligning IT and Business Goals
The WAF is a critical process for businesses to go through when moving resources to AWS. It enables you to review and improve your cloud-based architectures and better understand the business impact of your design decisions.We’ve led dozens of companies through the WAF and have learned how to refine the process to maximize results. We start with general design principles and move on to specific best practices and guidance within each pillar to ensure that your technology and business goals will be well-served.
