David Matthews, Director of Engineering at Uturn Data Solutions, spoke about the AWS Well-Architected Framework and how to use it to improve your business' cloud environment.

1. MIDWEST | CHICAGO

2. Living Well-Architected
David Matthews – Uturn Data Solutions | 2019 AWS Community Day

3. Director of Engineering, Uturn Data Solutions
• AWS Architect with 5+ years on AWS
• AWS Well-Architected Reviewer
About David Matthews

4. About Uturn Data Solutions
We are a Chicago-based Amazon Partner Network (APN)
Advanced Tier Consulting Partner that facilitates:
• Cloud Migration
• Well-Architected Reviews
• Serverless Optimization
• AWS Architect-in-Residence Program
• AWS Big Data Solutions

5. What is AWS Well-Architected?

6. What is the Well Architected Framework?
The Well-Architected Framework is designed to provide you
with high-level guidance and best practices to help you build
and maintain secure, reliable, performant, cost optimized,
and operationally excellent applications in the AWS Cloud.

7. Operational Excellence: Run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to
continually improve supporting processes and procedures.
Security: Protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through
risk assessments and mitigation strategies.
Reliability: Recover from infrastructure or service failures, dynamically acquire computing
resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient
network issues.
Performance Efficiency: Use computing resources efficiently to meet system
requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
Cost Optimization: Avoid or eliminate unneeded cost or suboptimal resources.
5 Pillars of Well Architected

8.   
Self-
Assessment
on AWS
Console
Amazon SA
Evolution of Well-Architected
Amazon SAAWS Solution
Architects
Well-Architected
Partners
Self-Assessment

9. Why live Well-Architected?

10. Lower risks - Understand your security risks and address
them before your application are put into production
Make Informed Decisions - Learn how architectural decisions
impart your applications and business outcomes
Learn AWS Best Practices - Guidance based on reviewing
thousands of customers’ architectures on AWS
Build and Deploy Faster - Use automation to make
experimentation easier by building cloud-native architectures
AWS Perspective

11. Trust your platform: Living Well-Architected allows for your business
to trust in the platform.
Third-Party Analysis: Honest third-party analysis gives your business
the confidence it needs to succeed.
Bring Business Users to the Conversation: The AWS Well-
Architected review requires both Technical and Business users to come
together to analyze a workload.
Analyze Changes over Time: The AWS Well-Architected self-
assessment tool includes milestone tracking to see how your workload
changes over different releases.
My Perspective

12. 100% of Uturn customers
who have had a Well-Architected Review are
interested in reviewing their workload again in
the future to ensure they stay Well-Architected.
100% of Uturn customers
had Security Pillar issues which had to be
remediated!
My Experience

13. How do you live Well-Architected?

14. • Experiment with new AWS services/features
• Consider Cost, Performance, Reliability, and Security
with every architectural change
• Create Run Books and Play Books
• Test architecture under production access patterns
Foster a Well-Architected Culture

15. Complete a Well-Architected Review
Schedule AWS Well-Architected Review
Half-Day in-person review with AWS Pro-Cert Architect
Review findings and recommendations
Remediate Workload Issues
1
2
3
4

16. Remediate Issues
• Prioritize issues based on criticality of your organization
• Fix any Needs Attention or Critical issue found during
the review
• Needs Attention - should be fixed in 1-3 months
• Critical - should be fixed in <1 month

17. Update Review after Milestones
• Review your workload again after different milestones
• New workload release
• New AWS Services/Feature releases
• Annually
• Milestones show how the workload has changed over time.

18. Common Obstacles
• Scheduling
• Determining appropriate workload
• Security/Access requirements
• Getting necessary approvals to conduct Well-Architected
Review (from Partners)

19. What is classified as a workload?

20. What is a workload?
• A workload is a collection of AWS resources and code that delivers
business value, such as a customer-facing application or a backend
process.
• A workload might consist of a subset of resources in a single AWS
account or be a collection of multiple resources spanning multiple
AWS accounts. A small business might have only a few workloads
while a large enterprise might have thousands.

21. What workloads should be reviewed?

22. Workloads to Review
• ALL WORKLOADS!

23. Who conducts Well-Architected Reviews?

24. AWS Solution Architects
Benefits
• Free service from AWS
• Pro-Certified Solution Architect
• Third-party analysis of the workload
Considerations
• Limited availability
• Most AWS SAs support 100s of accounts

25. AWS Well-Architected Program Partners
Benefits
• Pro-Certified Solution Architect
• Third-Party analysis of workload
• AWS promotions to offset costs
• Low risk opportunity to evaluate partner community
• Easy to schedule
Considerations
• Minor upfront cost, offset by AWS promotion credits
• Business approval for a third-party to analyze your
workload

26. Self-Assessment
Benefits
• Free AWS Well-Architected Tool on AWS Console
• Completed at your pace and schedule
Considerations
• Shortcuts are often taken when questions are
difficult to answer
• Inexperience conducting reviews and finding the
best compromises

27. What is the AWS Well-Architected Tool?

28. Announced at Re:Invent 2018
https://aws.amazon.com/well-architected-tool/

29. AWS Console Application
• Define multiple different workloads
• Based in AWS, on-prem, or other datacenters
• Easy view to see overall status and risks

30. Review Questions
• Blend of complex and straight-forward questions
• Requires business and technical mindsets
• Multiple choice answers
• Notes to document details/questions

31. Review Questions
1. List of Questions
2. Individual Question
3. Multiple Choice Answers
4. Resources to help
understand the answer
1
2
3
4

32. Improvement Plan
Overview of Risk Items Editable Improvement Priorities Recommendations for
Improvements

33. Milestone
• Tracks progress towards 0 high and medium risks
• Go back and see to previous milestone reports

34. Are there any AWS Incentives?

35. • Receive $5,000 usage credits from select AWS Partners for each
workload!!
• WARs often lead to funded Proofs-of-Concept (PoCs)
• Additional Acceleration Funding available for new workloads
AWS Incentives

36. Thank you!
David Matthews
dmatthews@uturndata.com
uturndata.com