Sander Knape, a Technical Team Lead at Coolblue, outlines their transition to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the importance of applying the AWS Well-Architected Framework to enhance cloud-based architectures. The framework emphasizes five pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization, providing guidelines for best practices and principles. Coolblue's implementation focuses on automation, security measures, and efficient resource management to ensure scalability and improved cost transparency.

1. Sander Knape| 22-03-2018

2. $ whoami
Sander Knape
● Technical Team Lead Cloud @ Coolblue (~2.5 years)
● Student @ Utrecht University
○ Bachelor Cognitive Artificial Intelligence
○ Master Business Informatics
● Backend + Frontend development
● Moved more towards (dev)ops @ Coolblue

3. Expectation Management
Agenda
● Introduction
● Coolblue to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
● Introduction to the Well-Architected Framework
● Go through the 5 pillars:
○ Operational Excellence
○ Security
○ Reliability
○ Performance Efficiency
○ Cost Optimization

4. >300 online shops & 9 physical stores

5. Delivery

6. Revenue in the years

8. So why the cloud?
Towards the future
● Scalability
● Automation <3
● Be ready for the future

9. Team Deployment

14. Finished in 6 months

15. AWS Well-Architected Framework

16. 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 -

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

18. Platform agnostic

20. 1 - Operational Excellence

21. 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

22. Infrastructure as Code

23. Coolblue in code

24. Zero insight

25. Zero insight

26. Transparency

27. Auditability

28. Reusability

29. Control for quality

30. Check, check, double check

31. Automation

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

34. Architecturing = Lego’ing

35. Don’t do it alone
● Based on AWS Essentials training
● Updated with the “Coolblue” implementation
● Best practices
● Labs
Share knowledge

36. 2 - Security

37. 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

38. Access Denied
Least-privileged authorization
Every entity should have access only exactly to those resources to which it needs access
No more, no less

40. Identity foundation
AWS accounts
● Testing
● Acceptance
● Production
View database contents

41. Private vs. Public subnets
Public subnets
Private subnets

42. Automate best practices

43. Base boxes

45. Linting CloudFormation

46. Still though - scan your environment

47. 3 - Reliability

48. 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

49. All about those 9’s

50. 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

51. Horizontal multi-AZ scaling
50% 50% 50%

52. Auto scaling

53. … Auto healing

54. Test before you go!

55. Test before you go!

56. Blue/Green deployments

57. Canary releases

58. Application Design for High Availability

59. Backups
“A backup isn’t a backup until you have tried to restore it” - Someone

60. GitLab - DevOops

61. GitLab - DevOops

62. Double win: anonymizing backups

63. 4 - Performance efficiency

64. 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

65. Candy shop

66. Managed Services over build-your-own

67. 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

68. This is (mostly) in the past now

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

70. Automatic load testing

71. Experiment more often
Development.
Did anyone say CloudFormation?

72. From Bare Metal to Functions

75. 5 - Cost optimization

76. 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

78. But: Tagging everything

79. TeamCity on Spot

80. Insights++

81. Dashboards and reports

82. 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

84. So why the Cloud?
Well-archited made much more easy!
● Granular IAM permissions
● Multi-AZ
● Blue/Green and Canary deployments
● Autoscaling and auto healing
● Tags everywhere
● Pay for what we use
● ...

86. Sander Knape | s.knape@coolblue.nl | https://www.coolblue.nl