cloud
AWS Architecting & Ecosystem
- 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 applications for flash sale days
AWS Cloud Best Practices - Design Principles
- Scalability: vertical & horizontal
- 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, 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 use just EC2
- Use managed services, databases, serverless, etc..
Well Architected Framework 6 Pillars
- Operational Excellence
- Security
- Reliability
- Performance Efficiency
- Cost Optimization
- Sustainability
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 - Infrastructure as code
- Annotate documentation - Automate the creation of annotated documentation after every build
- Make frequent, small, reversible changes - So that in case of any failure, you can reverse it
- Refine operations procedures frequently - And ensure that team members are familiar with it
- Anticipate failure
- Learn from all operational failures
2. Security
- Includes the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies
- Design Principles
- Implement a strong identity foundation - Centralize privilege management and reduce (or even eliminate) reliance on long-term credentials - Principle of least privilege - IAM
- Enable traceability - Integrate logs and metrics with systems to automatically respond and take action
- Apply security at all layers - Like edge network, VPC, subnet, load balancer, every instance, operating system, and application
- Automate security best practices
- Protect data in transit and at rest - Encryption, tokenization, and access control
- Keep people away from data - Reduce or eliminate the need for direct access or manual processing of data
- Prepare for security events - Run incident response simulations and use tools with automation to increase your speed for detection, investigation, and recovery
- Shared Responsibility Mode
3. 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 - Use automation to simulate different failures or to recreate scenarios that led to failures before
- Automatically recover from failure - Anticipate and remediate failures before they occur
- Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability - Distribute requests across multiple, smaller resources to ensure that they don’t share a common point of failure
- Stop guessing capacity - Maintain the optimal level to satisfy demand without over or under provisioning - Use Auto Scaling
- Manage change in automation - Use automation to make changes to infrastructure
4. Performance Efficiency
- Includes 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 - Advance technologies become services and hence you can focus more on product development
- Go global in minutes - Easy deployment in multiple regions
- Use serverless architectures - Avoid burden of managing servers
- Experiment more often - Easy to carry out comparative testing
- Mechanical sympathy - Be aware of all AWS services
5. Cost Optimization
- Includes the ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point
- Design Principles
- Adopt a consumption mode - Pay only for what you use
- Measure overall efficiency - Use CloudWatch
- Stop spending money on data center operations - AWS does the infrastructure part and enables customer to focus on organization projects
- Analyze and attribute expenditure - Accurate identification of system usage and costs, helps measure return on investment (ROI) - Make sure to use tags
- Use managed and application level services to reduce cost of ownership - As managed services operate at cloud scale, they can offer a lower cost per transaction or service
6. Sustainability
- The sustainability pillar focuses on minimizing the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads.
- Design Principles
- Understand your impact – establish performance indicators, evaluate improvements
- Establish sustainability goals – Set long-term goals for each workload, model return on investment (ROI)
- Maximize utilization – Right size each workload to maximize the energy efficiency of the underlying hardware and minimize idle resources.
- Anticipate and adopt new, more efficient hardware and software offerings – and design for flexibility to adopt new technologies over time.
- Use managed services – Shared services reduce the amount of infrastructure; Managed services help automate sustainability best practices as moving infrequent accessed data to cold storage and adjusting compute capacity.
- Reduce the downstream impact of your cloud workloads – Reduce the amount of energy or resources required to use your services and reduce the need for your customers to upgrade their devices
AWS Well-Architected Tool
- Free tool to review your architectures against the 6 pillars Well-Architected Framework and adopt architectural best practices
- How does it work?
- Select your workload and answer questions
- Review your answers against the 6 pillars
- Obtain advice: get videos and documentations, generate a report, see the results in a dashboard
- Let’s have a look: https://console.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected
AWS Right Sizing
- EC2 has many instance types, but choosing the most powerful instance type isn’t the best choice, because the cloud is elastic
- Right sizing is the process of matching instance types and sizes to your workload performance and capacity requirements at the lowest possible cost
- Scaling up is easy so always start small
- It’s also the process of looking at deployed instances and identifying opportunities to eliminate or downsize without compromising capacity or other requirements, which results in lower costs
- It’s important to Right Size…
- before a Cloud Migration
- continuously after the cloud onboarding process (requirements change over time)
- CloudWatch, Cost Explorer, Trusted Advisor, 3rd party tools can help
AWS Ecosystem - Free resources
- AWS Blogs: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/
- AWS Forums (community): https://forums.aws.amazon.com/index.jspa
- AWS Whitepapers & Guides: https://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers
- AWS Quick Starts: https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/
- Automated, gold-standard deployments in the AWS Cloud
- Build your production environment quickly with templates
- Example: WordPress on AWS https://fwd.aws/P3yyv?did=qs_card&trk=qs_card
- Leverages CloudFormation
- AWS Solutions: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/
- Vetted Technology Solutions for the AWS Cloud
- Example - AWS Landing Zone: secure, multi-account AWS environment
- https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/implementations/aws-landing-zone/
- “Replaced” by AWS Control Tower
AWS Ecosystem - AWS Support
| DEVELOPER | BUSINESS | ENTERPRISE |
|---|---|---|
| Business hours email access to Cloud Support Associates | 24x7 phone, email, and chat access to Cloud Support Engineers | Access to a Technical Account Manager (TAM) |
| General guidance: < 24 business hours | Production system impaired: < 4 hours | Concierge Support Team (for billing and account best practices) |
| System impaired: < 12 business hours | Production system down: < 1 hour | Business-critical system down: < 15 minutes |
AWS Marketplace
- Digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors (3rd party)
- Example:
- Custom AMI (custom OS, firewalls, technical solutions…)
- CloudFormation templates
- Software as a Service
- Containers
- If you buy through the AWS Marketplace, it goes into your AWS bill
- You can sell your own solutions on the AWS Marketplace
Other AWS Services
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