Graduate Program KB

AWS Architecting & Ecosystem

Well Architected Framework General Guiding Principles

  • Stop guessing your capacity needs.
  • Test systems at production scale.
  • Automate to make architectural experimentation easier.
  • Allow for evolutionary architectures: design based on changing requirements.
  • Drive architectures using data.
  • Improve through game days: simulate apps for flash sale days.

AWS Cloud Best Practices - Design Principles

  • Scalability: vertically and horizontally.
  • Disposable Resources: servers should be disposable & easily configured.
  • Automation: Serverless, Infrastructure as a Service, Auto Scaling.
  • Loose Coupling:
    • Monolith are applications that do more and more over time and become bigger.
    • Break it down into smaller, loosely coupled components.
    • A change or a failure in one component should not cascade to other components.
  • Services, not Servers: Don't just use EC2, use managed services, databases, serverless, etc.

Well Architected Framework 6 Pillars

  • They are not something to balance, or trade-offs, they're a synergy.
  1. Operational Excellence.
  • Includes the ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures.
  • Design Principles:
    • Perform operations as code.
    • Annotate documentation.
    • Make frequent, small, reversible changes.
    • Refine operations and procedures frequently.
    • Anticipate failure.
    • Learn from all operational failures.
  • Services to achieve this:
    • Prepare: AWS CloudFormation, AWS Config.
    • Operate: AWS CloudFormation, AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray.
    • Evolve: AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodePipeline.
  1. Security.
  • Being able to deliver whilst protecting your information, systems and assets.
  • Design Principles:
    • Implement a strong identity foundation.
    • Enable traceability.
    • Apply security at all layers.
    • Automate security best practices.
    • Protect data in transit and at rest.
    • Keep people away from data.
    • Prepare for security events.
    • Shared responsibility model.
  • Services too achieve this:
    • Identity and Access Management: IAM, AWS-STS, MFA Token, AWS Organizations.
    • Detective Controls: AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch.
    • Infrastructure Protection: Amazon CloudFront, Amazon VPC, AWS Shield, AWS WAF, Amazon Inspector.
    • Data Protection: KMS, S3, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon EBS, Amazon RDS.
    • Incident Response: IAM, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon CloudWatch Events.
  1. Reliability.
  • Ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues.
  • Design Principles:
    • Test recovery procedures.
    • Automatically recover from failure.
    • Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability.
    • Stop guessing capacity.
    • Manage change in automation.
  • Services to achieve this:
    • Foundations: IAM, Amazon VPC, Services Quotas, AWS Trusted Advisor.
    • Change Management: AWS Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config.
    • Failure Management: Backups, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Glacier, Amazon Route53.
  1. Performance Efficiency.
  • The ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
  • Design Principles:
    • Democratize advanced technologies.
    • Go global in minutes.
    • Use serverless architectures.
    • Experiment more often.
    • Mechanical sympathy.
  • Services to achieve this:
    • Selection: AWS Auto Scaling, AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon RDS.
    • Review: AWS CloudFormation, AWS News blog.
    • Monitoring: Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Lambda.
    • Tradeoffs: Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache, AWS Snowball, Amazon CloudFront.
  1. Cost Optimization.
  • Ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price points.
  • Design Principles:
    • Adopt a consumption mode.
    • Measure overall efficiency.
    • Stop spending money on data center operations.
    • Analyze and attribute expenditure.
    • Use managed and application level services to reduce cost of ownership.
  • Services to achieve this:
    • Expenditure Awareness: AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Report, AWS Cost Explorer, Reserved Instance Reporting.
    • Cost-Effective Resources: Spot instance, Reserved instance, Amazon S3 Glacier.
    • Matching supply and demand: AWS Auto Scaling, AWS Lambda.
    • Optimizing Over Time: AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Cost and Usage Report.
  1. Sustainability.
  • Focuses on minimizing the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads.
  • Design Principles:
    • Understand your impact.
    • Establish sustainability goals.
    • Maximize utilization.
    • Anticipate and adopt new, more efficient hardware and software offerings.
    • Use managed services.
    • Reduce the downstream impact of your cloud workloads.
  • Services to achieve this:
    • EC2 Auto Scaling, Serverless Offerings (Lambda, Fargate).
    • Cost Explorer, AWS Graviton 2, EC2 T instances, Spot instances.
    • EFS-IA, Amazon S3 Glacier, EBS Cold HDD volumes.
    • S3 Lifecycle Configurations, S3 Intelligent Tiering.
    • Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager.
    • Read Local, Write Global: RDS Read Replicas, Aurora Global DB, DynamoDB Global Table, CloudFront.

AWS Well-Architected Tool

  • A free tool to review your architecture against the 6 pillars above.
  • You just select your workload and answer questions, then review your answers against the 6 pillars.

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework

  • Helps you build and execute a comprehensive plan for your digital transformation through the use of AWS.
  • AWS CAF identifies specific organizational capabilities that underpin successful cloud transformations.
  • AWS CAF groups its capabilities in six perspectives: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations.

Perspective Breakdown:

  • Business Perspective helps ensure that your cloud investments accelerate your digital transformation ambitions and business outcomes.
  • People Perspective serves as a bridge between technology and business, accelerating the cloud journey to help organizations more rapidly evolve to a culture of continuous growth, learning, and where change becomes business-as-normal, with focus on culture, organizational structure, leadership, and workforce.
  • Governance Perspective helps you orchestrate your cloud initiatives while maximizing organizational benefits and minimizing transformation related risks.
  • Platform Perspective helps you build an enterprise-grade, scalable, hybrid cloud platform; modernize existing workloads; and implement new cloud-native solutions.
  • Security Perspective helps you achieve the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data and cloud workloads.
  • Operations Perspective helps ensure that your cloud services are delivered at a level that meets the needs of your business.

Transformation Domains

  • Technology: using the cloud to migrate and modernize legacy infrastructure, apps, data and analytic platforms.
  • Process: digitizing, automating, and optimizing your business operations.
  • Organization: re-imagining your operating model. Organizing your teams around products and value streams. Leveraging agile methods to rapidly iterate and evolve.
  • Product: re-imagining your business model by creating new value propositions and revenue models.
  • Envision: demonstrate how the cloud will accelerate business outcomes by identifying transformation opportunities and create a foundation gor your digital transformation.
  • Align: identify capability gaps across the 6 AWS CAF perspectives which results in an action plan.
  • Launch: build and deliver pilot initiatives in production and demonstrate incremental business value.
  • Scale: expand pilot initiatives to the desired scale while realizing the desired business benefits.

AWS Right Sizing

  • Refers to the process of matching instance types and sizes to your workload performance and capacity requirements at the lowest possible cost.
  • Scaling up is easy but always start small.
  • It's important to right size before a cloud migration and continuously after the cloud onboarding process.

AWS Ecosystem - Resources

AWS IQ

  • Quickly find professional help for your AWS projects.
  • Engage and pay AWS Certified 3rd party experts for on-demand project work.

AWS Managed Services (AMS)

  • Provides infrastructure and application support on AWS.
  • AMS offers a team of AWS experts who manage and operate your infrastructure for security, reliability, and availability.
  • Helps organizations offload routine management tasks and focus on their business objectives.
  • Fully managed service.
  • Implements best practices and maintains your AWS infrastructure to reduce your operational overhead and risk.
  • AMS business hours are 24/365.