Key Take-aways: Read the F*cking Manual, Spend time on building your Foundation (VPC, Subnets, Deployment pipelines) and LEARN LEARN LEARN!!

1. Frank van Boven & Jamie van Brunschot | 31-01-2018

2. Expectation Management
Agenda
● Introduction
● Coolblue to AWS
● Introduction to the Well-architected Framework
● Go through the 5 pillars:
○ Operational Excellence
○ Security
○ Reliability
○ Performance Efficiency
○ Cost Optimization
● BEER!!

4. Twitter: @fat_basstard
LinkedIn: fvanboven

5. Twitter: @JvanBrunschot
LinkedIn: jamievanbrunschot

6. Coolblue

8. 300 online shops & 9 physical stores

9. 2017

16. Finished in 6 months

17. AWS Well-Architected Framework

18. Whitepaper
https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS_Well-Architected_Framework.pdf
“This document describes the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which enables you to
review and improve your cloud-based architectures and better understand the
business impact of your design decisions. We address general design principles as well
as specific best practices and guidance in five conceptual areas that we define as the
pillars of the Well-Architected Framework.”
- Abstract -

19. Operational
Excellence
Security Reliability
Performance
Efficiency
Cost
Optimization
Well-architected Framework
Design Principles Best Practices Experience

20. Cloud agnostic

22. 1 - Operational Excellence

23. Operational excellence
“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, and defining standards to
successfully manage daily operations.” - AWS Well-Architected Framework
https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Operational-Excellence-Pillar.pdf

24. Infrastructure as Code

25. Infrastructure as Code

26. Check, check, double check

27. Continuous Improvements

28. Testing + Acceptance = Production
Automated deployment
● All accounts are “production” accounts:
○ Testing
○ Acceptance
○ Production
● Fully read-only from day 0
○ Bootstrap process documented
● All code is linted, checked and tested at PR

29. Knowledge is power
Knowledge & Mindset
● AWS != On-premise
● Get knowledge about AWS:
○ Documentation
○ Whitepapers
○ Certification

30. Get everybody certified

31. Train your people
● Based on AWS Essentials training
● Updated with the “Coolblue” implementation
● Best practices
● Labs
Tailored Coolblue AWS Training

32. 2 - Security

33. Security
“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.” - AWS Well-Architected Framework
https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Security-Pillar.pdf

34. Identity foundation
AWS accounts
● Management
● Billing
● Logging
● Testing, Acceptance, Production and Shared
● Development (15+)

35. ● Private/Public
● DNS
● Maintenance
● Security
● Infrastructure/IAM
Separation of Powers

36. Access Denied
Least-privileged authorization
“Did not have IAM permissions to process tags on AWS::DynamoDB::Table resource.” -
CloudFormation

38. Traceability

39. Wij van WC-eend...

40. CloudSploit

41. Automate best practices

42. Base boxes

44. 3 - Reliability

45. Reliability
“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.” - AWS
Well-Architected Framework
https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Reliability-Pillar.pdf

46. All about those 9’s
1 region, 3 AZ’s
● All applications:
○ 1 region
○ 3 Availability Zones
● 99.99% uptime
● Application Design for High Availability

47. Auto scaling...

48. … Auto healing

49. Monitoring & Logging

50. Application Design for High Availability

51. 4 - Performance efficiency

52. Performance efficiency
“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.” - AWS Well-Architected Framework
https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Performance-Efficiency-Pillar.pdf

53. Candy shop

54. Managed Services over build-your-own

55. Enabling services
● Standardisation (“1 size fits all”)
● Security best practices
● Linting
● Deployment
● Monitoring & Logging

56. Example list
Build-your-own Managed Service
RabbitMQ SNS/SQS
RavenDB (NoSQL) DynamoDB
MySQL RDS Aurora
Memcached / Redis ElastiCache
HAProxy Application Load Balancer
ELK Managed Splunk
RPM (Application Deployment) CodeDeploy

57. Oops.. do some load tests
Instance Types
● General Purpose
● Compute Optimized
● Memory Optimized
● Accelerated Computing
● Storage Optimized

58. Automatic load testing

59. Experiment more often
Development.
Where is the “export to CloudFormation” button?

60. 5 - Cost optimization

61. Cost optimization
“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, and scaling to meet business needs
without overspending.” - AWS Well-Architected Framework
https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Cost-Optimization-Pillar.pdf

63. But: Tagging everything

64. Full transparency

65. TeamCity on Spot

66. Insights++

67. Dashboards and reports

68. Cost responsibility
Responsible for costs
● Costs made transparent with CloudHealth
● Billing reports for the organisation (e.g. PO, Finance) per “team”:
○ Applications
○ Shared resources
○ Development account
● Finance in the driver’s seat in Cost Optimization

69. The most important person of the day

71. Read The F*cking Manual

72. Spend time on the Foundation

73. Learn, learn, learn