In 2015, Werner Vogels, the CTO of AWS, introduced a Whitepaper in the annual re:Invent conference that included the best practices for handling workloads running on the cloud. The content in the paper lists out pillars upon ten years of AWS' experience with professional services teams, product teams, and customer experiences. With the evolution of AWS offerings, the company formulated the AWS Well-Architected framework, which stated the ideal state in which AWS infrastructures should function through the pillars.
The AWS Well-Architected Review assesses your AWS infrastructure to gauge whether your systems are functioning as per the benchmarks set by AWS. It is a systematic way of comparing existing AWS workloads with standards to discover and fix potential issues in the system.
The Well-Architected Review identifies and defines architectural best practices for the AWS infrastructure. AWS ecosystems are in constant transit. Development teams regularly codify and experiment with AWS for managing workloads and developing applications, eventually changing AWS configurations. The change reduces the performance and efficiency of AWS. Hence, organizations should check their infrastructure to reset it periodically.
The Well-Architected tool, in-built in the AWS console, performs the review. You can do this in-house or through an expert. Collaborating with a certified AWS partner is recommended as AWS provides credits when a partner conducts the inspection. After identifying the workload you need to check for, the tool diagnoses the workload against the five fundamental pillars to give findings.
You can question your workloads for the five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Review to assess the performance of your infrastructure.
The AWS infrastructure assures that businesses build high-performing, secure, robust, and scalable apps. Operational excellence enables you to run and monitor the systems that generate value and helps improve on elements supporting your applications and workloads.
Securing AWS infrastructures is paramount against sophisticated threats. The security pillar equips businesses to protect systems and assets while delivering value. A large part of the security facet comprises risk assessments and mitigation strategies to augment securing the AWS infrastructure.
The reliability pillar acts as a fail-safe for the AWS infrastructure. It checks the tenacity of the infrastructure to recover against disruptions, shortfall of computing resources, and rising demands. The aim is to check the efficiency of the system in mitigating major red flags and failures.
Resource allocation grid is a complex challenge that businesses face periodically. The performance efficiency pillar ensures optimization of resources depending on the demand. Business efficiency streamlines as resources remain consistent against customer demands and technology changes.
One of the vital components for generating revenues for businesses is saving costs. High infrastructure costs can significantly hamper business outcomes and reduce value. The cost optimization pillar ensures that business systems run at the lowest price point, providing more dollars for the cent.
Each pillar has specific design principles that the Well-Architected Review tool checks during the assessment. After the review is over, you will receive videos and documents that speak about AWS best practices, a summary of the workload review, and a dashboard encompassing cross-organizational workload reviews. The findings help fix issues highlighted in the review report and improve your infrastructure
If you leverage AWS, opting for the Well-Architected Review is a great idea. The sustenance and continuity of your applications are dependent on the health of your AWS infrastructure. Regular check-ups shed light on the issues in the framework, which are easy to remediate. However, finding the fault before it collapses is essential, which the review helps achieve.
ROIs are another factor for the review. If you have a substantial investment in AWS, the system's longevity is vital to achieving great returns on your investment. The review per se is free when done by an AWS partner with credits in-line. Hence, it is advisable to choose a reliable partner to get the inspection done. It takes half a day to do the review, so it is not time-intensive.
Our experts will meet you and assess your AWS infrastructure when you collaborate with us. We'll walk you through a set of questions in sync with the infrastructure and benchmark your system against the set standard by the AWS Well-Architected Framework. After the review, we'll share the results with recommendations on what you need to do to improve your infrastructure. The proposals will list as "no changes required," "medium risk," and "high risk identified." The recommendation priority is as per the urgency, with high-impact items highlighted for your attention.
Watch our AWS Certified experts talk about the AWS Well-Architected Review in detail in this webinar.
