Introduction
When you build your infrastructure in the cloud, you need to apply the best practices to make sure your architecture is resilient, fault tolerant and cost effective. The implementation of these best practices would help you to provision and deploy your resources with proactive monitoring. AWS Well-Architected Tool helps you achieve just that. Well Architected Tool is a free service by AWS wherein the best practices and implementation guidelines are set up for you to take your architecture to the next level, as it mainly assists you in building data-driven architectures, apply automation where possible, and test your systems at scale. These practices are distributed across six different pillars.
6 pillars of Well Architected Framework
- Operational excellence: operational practices and procedures to manage production workloads, like through the use of runbooks and playbooks.
- Security: protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies.
- Reliability: the ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet the demand, mitigate misconfigurations or network issues.
- Performance efficiency: efficient use of the computing resources through demand changes.
- Cost optimization: assessing ability to eliminate unneeded costs for sub-optimal (less than standard quality) resources.
- Sustainability: understanding the impact of the services used and applying design principles to monitor and analyze these impacts.
There are certain sets of questions within the 6 pillars mentioned above, where each question focuses on only one component of your workload at a time, allowing you to work on your architecture in detail. In a time where most companies using cloud services mainly focus on cost reduction and optimization, Well-Architected has defined a perfect workload as that which would be secure, efficient, available, reliable, and sustainable along with the cost optimization part, the point being an architecture where your costs are reduced does not necessarily mean that you have your workloads well configured with all the best practices implemented. You have to have that additional level of certainty that the workloads will not fail or slow down at any step.
How does the AWS Well-Architected work?
As said earlier, the best practices that you are required to implement are prioritized according to your workload configuration. AWS offers Lenses from the Lens Catalog within the tool to achieve this.
For example, it provides you the AWS Well-Architected Lens, which is basically the foundational set of practices for your entire cloud architecture, the Serverless Lens, which provides some additional set of best practices for your Serverless applications, Healthcare Industry Lens, to design and deploy your healthcare applications on AWS, the SaaS lens which provides further best practices for your SaaS applications, and so on. You can easily choose your architecture and apply best practices accordingly. Additionally, AWS has also introduced a new feature recently called ‘Profiles’, where you need to answer some questions before the review starts about your architecture type and your areas of focus, and the review questions will be prioritized for you according to your answers. This way, the questions are filtered out as the important ones for your architecture which makes it convenient for you to perform the actual review. Here is a demonstration of the questions:
After you answer these questions about your business, the Well Architected Tool automatically prioritizes certain questions within the universal set of questions that best suit your needs, and you can simply apply this profile by selecting the profile at the time of workload creation or even after that. That’s how you can leverage the tool’s features to enhance your workloads.
Reviewing your architecture with Well Architected Tool
In the actual review phase, you first tick all the best practices that have been implemented in your defined workload according to the questions asked. Once this process is complete for all 6 pillars, Well-Architected Tool presents you with a certain number of HRIs (High Risk Issues) and MRIs (Medium Risk Issues) you need to mitigate. HRIs are the critical issues that need to be resolved as early as possible, and MRIs are the issues that are indirectly affecting the optimum performance of your workload. You can see both categories of these issues listed on, so mitigation means is convenient as well. Additionally, all the questions and best practices within the Well-Architected Tool have been documented by AWS with step-by-step implementation guidelines. Even better, AWS provides Well-Architected Labs ( https://www.wellarchitectedlabs.com/) which has made it easier to practice the implementation process before actually doing it on your workload, which makes the implementation process safer and fault-protected. After you have finally finished implementing those, you go back to the review and now tick the previously unticked practices that have now been implemented. This would reduce your HRIs and MRIs, and your workload would be Well-Architected. AWS provides you with a review report which you can download as a PDF file.
Integration with other AWS services
AWS has made it easier for you to integrate the Well-Architected Tool with other services like AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Security Hub, AWS Config and so on. These services could help in auto-discovery of the HRIs and MRIs within your workload and auto-remediate those without any manual intervention, and it would be only a matter of some minutes to some hours to make your workload Well-Architected. But you need to be aware of the charges that come with using these services, hence it is recommended to have a proper research on these additional services and if they comply with your cost and usage goals before integrating them into your Well-Architected Tool.
Here is a basic demonstration of how you can link your workloads to AWS Trusted Advisor:
Simply click the “Activate Trusted Advisor” to integrate it. After you do that, here is how Trusted Advisor runs checks and recommends you while you answer the questions:
Conclusion
Overall, AWS Well-Architected Tool has played a significant role in ensuring the proper operation and maintenance of the cloud architecture. Implementation status of the listed best practices can make a difference in the productivity levels throughout your cloud infrastructure. The best part about this service is that the best practices are not just limited to what’s there already, rather AWS regularly updates the questions within the pillars and the best practices that come with them, allowing you to practice the latest recommendations. Hence, you could definitely use this service to your advantage to improve your architecture, and stay ahead in the game.