Have you taken advantage of AWS Well-architected Framework ?

Let’s begin by asking, is your AWS deployment well-architected? Do you think your AWS infrastructure is delivering on your business goals? Each customer will likely have different goals—operational excellence, reliability, security, optimum cost, high performance—depending on the business requirement.

While AWS services are easy to use, secure and cost-effective, customers must understand the offerings, deploy the right resources correctly in alignment with business requirements to harvest maximum advantage. Towards this, AWS architecture has well-documented best practices to use as frame of reference—the AWS Well-architected framework—comprising foundational questions based on the experience of thousands of customers which enables to measure the architecture against best practices and address shortcomings.

AWS Well-architected framework rests on five pillars which includes:

• Operational Excellence:The ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures. It examines areas such as managing and automating changes, ability to respond to events, and defines standards to successfully manage daily operations.
• Security:The ability to protect information and systems including confidentiality and integrity of data, identifying and managing who can do what with privilege management, protecting systems, and establishing controls to detect security events.
• Reliability:The ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues.
• Performance Efficiency:The performance efficiency pillar focuses on using cloud resources efficiently by reviewing whether the resource types are aligned with workload requirements, monitoring performance, and making informed decisions to maintain efficiency as business needs evolve.
• Cost Optimization:The ability to avoid or eliminate unnecessary costs by understanding and controlling expenditure by analyzing spend over time, selecting the appropriate and right number of resources.

When architecting solutions you make trade-offs between pillars based upon your business context. If your need is for development environment you might optimize to reduce cost; for mission-critical solutions, you might optimize reliability with increased costs. While for ecommerce solutions, performance is a non-negotiable business imperative.

Umbrella in collaboration with AWS experts organizes intensive interactions with customers to help evaluate existing architecture and align it with business goals. Umbrella conducted such workshops with Kent, Nicobar and Urjakart helping align the AWS infrastructure with business requirements, based on principles of redundancy and scalability to achieve higher security, efficiency and cost-savings.

If you are not happy with the performance of cloud infrastructure or if you want to optimize costs, talk to our experts. Umbrella Infocare is certified AWS Managed Service Provider, bringing in-depth understanding of AWS services and best practices.