In the ever-changing landscape of your AWS environment, with engineers constantly provisioning and experimenting with various services, it’s essential to maintain order and ensure your cloud environment stays up to date and complies with the standards.
AWS recommends conducting a Well-Architected Review every 12-18 months. This review is an approach that systematically evaluates your AWS architecture and helps identify and address potential issues within your setup. This review is based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework, an extensive collection of AWS best practices covered in multiple whitepapers.
The Well-Architected Framework comprises six distinct pillars, each focusing on a specific aspect of your environment:
- Operational Excellence: Running and monitoring systems to deliver business value and continually improving supporting processes and procedures through six design principles, such as performing operations as code and learning from operational failures.
- Security: Protecting information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies. This pillar includes six design principles, like implementing a solid identity foundation and automating security best practices.
- Reliability: Ensuring the system can recover from disruptions, meet demand for computing resources, and mitigate network issues. To enhance reliability, AWS recommends practices like testing recovery procedures and scaling horizontally for increased system availability.
- Performance Efficiency: Optimally utilizing resources to meet changing requirements as demand and technology evolve. This pillar includes five principles, such as using serverless architectures for quick deployment and democratizing advanced technologies by leveraging cloud vendors.
- Cost Optimization: Running systems to deliver business value at the lowest cost point. This pillar involves adopting a consumption model, measuring overall efficiency, and using managed services to reduce ownership costs.
- Sustainability: The discipline of sustainability addresses the long-term environmental, economic, and societal impact of your business activities.
Conducting a Well-Architected Review involves a cloud expert using the Well-Architected tool to assess your workload against the six pillars. Once the review is completed, you will receive a report summarizing the findings and recommendations. The review results will be available on a dashboard for organization-wide visibility, allowing us to take remediation actions on the issues!
At FourCo, we can conduct this Well-Architected Review for your organization and obtain your funding from AWS to offset the review/remediation cost.
