Is Your AWS Cloud Infrastructure Well-Architected?

As more and more organisations adopt the cloud, utilising AWS can involve various resources and dozens of services depending on your objectives. Once your company has migrated or has architected solutions on AWS, your infrastructure can get more complicated leading you to overlook innovative AWS solutions or cost savings.

To address this, AWS established the Well-Architected Framework. This framework, comprised of a set of questions and design principles across five pillars helps customers understand the pros and cons of decisions made while building their systems on AWS.

AltoStack’s goal is to help companies build a strong operational foundation allowing them to enhance their AWS architecture to be more cost-effective, secure, and reliable. A Well-Architected Framework review is either conducted by AWS or by an Authorized AWS Consulting Partner.

The five pillars of the AWS Well Architected Framework are:

Security: Focuses on protecting information & systems. Key topics: 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 ability to prevent, and to quickly recover from failures to meet business and customer demand. Key topics: foundational elements around setup, cross project requirements, recovery planning, and how we handle change.

Performance Efficiency: Focuses on using IT and computing resources efficiently. Key topics: 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 Optimisation: The ability to avoid un-needed costs. Key topics: understanding and controlling where money is being spent, selecting the most appropriate and right number of resource types, analysing spend over time, and scaling to meet business needs without overspending.

Operation Excellence: Focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business value, and continually improving processes and procedures. Key topics: managing and automating changes, responding to events, and defining standards to successfully manage daily operations.

The strength of a building lies in its foundation. The same is for architecting your technology solutions. The Well-Architected Framework is a valuable resource and by incorporating these five pillars into your architecture, you will be able to build up a strong operational foundation of your environment allowing you to optimise AWS solutions while receiving cost savings benefits.

We have seen many customers find genuine value from an AWS review, as it gives them assurances they are using the AWS platform to its greatest extent. Please reach out to us here to get your AWS Well-Architected review underway today.