A short summary describing the major guiding principles of each of the five pillars and key actions that can be taken based on the key points mentioned

1. Well-Architected
Framework in
Summary
Ewere Diagboya • 05.12.2018
Infrastructure Engineer

2. Overview
Introduction
Five Pillars
● Security
● Reliability
● Operational Excellence Pillar
● Performance Efficiency Pillar
● Cost Optimization Pillar

3. Are you well-architected ?

4. The security pillar focuses on protecting information
& systems. Key topics include;
- confidentiality and integrity of data,
- identifying and managing who can do what with
privilege management,
- protecting systems, and establishing controls to
detect security events.
Security Pillar

5. Security Pillar
Key Points
● Who can do what with Identity and Access Management
● Detecting security events with detective controls (Log Analysis)
● Protecting systems with Infrastructure Protection (Network Protection & Hosts)
● Confidentiality and Integrity of Data (Encryption, Backup, Replication, Data State
Protection)
● Responding to Security Events (Incidence Response) - resource tagging with staff

6. Security Pillar
Key Actions
● Implement a strong identity foundation
● Enable traceability aka Audit Trail
● Apply security at all layers (e.g., edge network, VPC, subnet, load balancer, every instance,
operating system, and application)
● Automate security best practices
● Protect data in transit and at rest
● Keep people away from data
● Prepare for security events

7. Reliability Pillar
The reliability pillar focuses on the ability to prevent,
and quickly recover from failures to meet business and
customer demand. Key topics include;
- foundational elements around setup, cross project
requirements, recovery planning, and how we handle
change.

8. Reliability Pillar
Key Points
● Foundational elements that are based on setup and post project requirements
(Design for high availability)
● How to handle change across workloads (Change Management, Automation)
● Recovering from Failure with Failure management

9. Reliability Pillar
Key Actions
● Test recovery procedures
● Automatically recover from failure
● Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability
● Stop guessing capacity
● Manage change in automation

10. Operational Excellence Pillar
The operational excellence pillar focuses on running
and monitoring systems to deliver business value,
and continually improving processes and
procedures. Key topics include;
- managing and automating changes, responding
to events
- defining standards to successfully manage daily
operations.

11. Operational Excellence Pillar
Key Points
● Prepare; understanding the business and customer needs and decide
operational priorities design for operations and access readiness of workload
and team to make informed decisions about when to go live
● Operate; understanding how to operate your workload by understanding the
operational workload with metrics and responding to planned an unplanned
events
● Evolve; continuous improvement process for workload and operations, by
learning and sharing learnings with the whole organization

12. Operational Excellence Pillar
Key Actions
● Perform operations as code
● Annotated documentation
● Make frequent, small, reversible changes
● Refine operations procedures frequently
● Anticipate failure
● Learn from all operational failures

13. Performance Efficiency Pillar
The performance efficiency pillar focuses on using IT and
computing resources efficiently. Key topics include;
- selecting the right resource types and sizes based on
workload requirements,
- monitoring performance, and making informed decisions
to maintain efficiency as business needs evolve.

14. Performance Efficiency Pillar
Key Points
● Selecting the right resource types for computing, storage, databases
and networking
● Reviewing selection as AWS grow with new features and resource
types
● Being aware of how resources are performing by monitoring
● Making architectural trade-offs to maximize performance efficiency

15. Performance Efficiency Pillar
Key Actions
● Go global in minutes
● Use serverless architectures
● Experiment more often
● Mechanical sympathy (For example, consider data access patterns
when you select database or storage approaches)

16. Cost Optimization Pillar
Cost Optimization focuses on avoiding un-needed
costs. Key topics include;
- understanding and controlling where money is being
spent
- selecting the most appropriate and right number of
resource types
- analyzing spend over time,
- scaling to meet business needs without
overspending.

17. Cost Optimization Pillar
Key Points
● How to pick Cost-effective resource types (e.g. RI & Spot Instances)
● Matching supply and demand with approaches like autoscaling
● Controlling and understanding were money is spent, with
expenditure awareness
● Optimizing over time by using new features or services

18. Cost Optimization Pillar
Key Actions
● Adopt a consumption model (Pay only for what you use)
● Measure overall efficiency
● Stop spending money on data center operations (Measure the
business output of the system and the costs associated with
delivering it)
● Optimizing over time by using new features or services

19. Thank you
Questions ?