Are You Well Architected? The Well-Architected Framework - Part 1

In this episode, we cover the following topics:

• AWS Well-Architected Framework
  • Provides consistent approach to evaluating systems against cloud best practices
  • Helps advise changes necessary to make specific architecture align with best practices
  • Comprised of 3 components:
    • Design Principles
    • Pillars
      • Operational Excellence
      • Security
      • Reliability
      • Performance Efficiency
      • Cost Optimization
    • Questions
• General design principles
  • Cloud-native has changed everything. In cloud, you can:
    • Stop guessing capacity needs
    • Test at scale
    • Automate all the things to make experimentation easier
    • Allow for evolutionary architectures (you are never stuck with a particular technology)
    • Drive architectures using data (allows you to make fact based decisions on how to improve your workload)
    • Improve through game days
• Pillars in depth
  • Operational Excellence
    • "Ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continuously improve supporting processes and procedures"
    • Design principles
      • Perform operations as code
      • Annotate documentation
      • Make frequent, small, reversible changes
      • Refine operations procedures frequently
      • Anticipate failure
      • Learn from all operational failures
    • Key service: CloudFormation
    • Focus areas
      • Prepare
        • Services: AWS Config, AWS Config Rules
      • Operate
        • Services: CloudWatch, X-Ray, CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs
      • Evolve
        • Services: Elasticsearch (for searching log data to gain insights), CloudWatch Insights
    • Best practices
      • Prepare
        • Implement telemetry for:
          • Application
          • Workload
          • User activity
          • Dependencies
        • Implement transaction traceability
      • Operate
        • Any event for which you raise an alert should have associated runbook
          • Runbook defines triggers for escalations
        • Users should be notified when system is impacted
        • Communicate status through dashboards
          • Provide dashboards to communicate the current operating status of the business and provide metrics of interest
      • Evolve
        • Feedback loops
          • Identify areas for improvement
          • Gauge impact of changes to the system (i.e. did it make an improvement?)
          • Perform operations metrics reviews
            • Retrospective analysis of operations metrics
              • Use these reviews to identify opportunities for improvement, potential courses of action, and share lessons learned
    • Key points
      • Runbooks, playbooks
      • Document environments
      • Make small changes through automation
      • Monitor workload with business metrics
      • Exercise your response to failures
      • Have well-defined escalation management
• In future episodes, we'll cover the remaining 4 pillars

Links

• AWS Well-Architected Framework - Online/HTML version
  • includes drill down pages for each review question, with recommended action items to address that issue
• Are You Well-Architected?
• AWS re:Invent 2016 Keynote: Werner Vogels
  • See: 25:45 through 31:25
• Runbooks
• Playbooks
• AWS Service Health Dashboard
• AWS Personal Health Dashboard
  
  

Whitepapers

• AWS Well-Architected Framework
• Operational Excellence Pillar
• Security Pillar
• Reliability Pillar
• Performance-Efficiency Pillar
• Cost Optimization Pillar

End Song:
30 Days & 30 Nights by Fortune Finder

For a full transcription of this episode, please visit the episode webpage.

We'd love to hear from you! You can reach us at:

• Web: https://mobycast.fm
• Voicemail: 844-818-0993
• Email: [email protected]
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/hashtag/mobycast
• Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/mobycast