After some years migrating workloads from on premise to the cloud, after some years developing cloud first apps, the amount of architectures, technologies and hyperscalers have been expanding their value and support for millions of business and companies… The Well Architected Framework is nothing else that an approach to optimize all those IT solutions from several perspectives.

AWS Approach...

In 2012 AWS created the “Well-Architected” initiative to share with their customers and partners best practices for building in the cloud, and started publishing them in 2015. Now these set of principles are a reality and expanded to many cloud scenarios.

Let say we have some workloads and IT solutions in cloud providers such as AWS or Microsoft Azure with some complexity. Adding to that, we are not sure if the current scenario is designed according the best practices in terms of reliability as the IT service has some small delay responses to the users from time to time. Moreover, when you browse your AWS cost explorer console, this IT Service has a high consumption..

What can we do?, how can we shed some light on this?. OK, AWS provides a set of best practices, principles and strategists to reduce risk and impacts on these areas i´ve mentioned before as well as in other areas. Those areas, indeed, pillars are five:

• Operational Excellence: The ability to support development and run workloads effectively, gain insight into their operations, and to continuously improve supporting processes and procedures to deliver business value.
• Security: it´s focused on protect data, systems, and assets to take advantage of cloud technologies to improve your security.
• Reliability: Enforces the ability of a workload to perform its intended function correctly and consistently when it’s expected to.
• Performance Efficiency: The ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
• Cost Optimization: The ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point.

The AWS approach for the Well Architected Framework provides a great value to improve a specific workload or some workloads with some interdependence. To leverage the five pillars potential, the Well-Architected Tool helps you review the digital state of your workloads and compares them to the latest AWS architectural best practices on those areas.

Even, If you want to be more specific and deep dive in a technology or a disruptive solution to identify a clear impact or reduce risk for your workloads, AWS offers AWS Well-Architected Lenses since 2017.

Some examples of Lens which, from my point of view, bring value, are:

Management and Governance Lens – AWS Well-Architected

Hybrid Networking Lens – AWS Well-Architected

SAP Lens – AWS Well-Architected

Financial Services Industry Lens – AWS Well-Architected

Serverless Applications Lens – AWS Well-Architected

In the second part of this post, we will explain the Azure Well Architected Framework. I hope it´s useful to you and it makes your day!.

Enjoy the journey to the cloud with me…see you then in the next post.