The well-architected framework provides best practices for creating an optimal framework to improve the quality of your workloads. By designing a well-architected framework, you can build a solid foundation for your cloud infrastructure.
It can also help serve as the framework to compare or review potential changes.
Incorporating the five pillars of the well-architected framework helps produce a high-quality, stable, and efficient cloud architecture.
- Operational Excellence
- Security
- Reliability
- Performance Efficiency
- Cost Optimization
While AWS first unveiled the well-architected framework’s five pillars in a presentation given by Wener Vogels at a 2015 conference, the principles have been adopted by all of the major cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, in some form or function.
Let’s take a look at each of the five pillars and how they produce a solid foundation.
1. Operational Excellence
Operational experience is all about supporting development and running effective workloads. This allows you to get insights into operations, processes, and procedures to deliver value.
AWS recommends including a series of design principles for the cloud, including:
- Performing operations as code
- Making frequent — but small and reversible — revisions
- Review ops and procedures regularly
- Prepare for failure and learn from them
Wherever possible, automate deployments to reduce human error.
It’s also essential to design your operational framework to accommodate change as well. Business is rarely static. You need to be able to adapt as your business needs evolve.
2. Security
Part of the well-architected framework design is to incorporate security throughout the entire lifecycle. The Microsoft Azure team recommends you focus on broad security across these key areas:
- Identity management
- Infrastructure protection
- Application security
- Data sovereignty/encryption
- Secure architecture
3. Reliability
One of the most important aspects of cloud infrastructure is the ability to run workloads when you need. That requires both reliability and resiliency. Designing a well-architected framework goes beyond choosing a highly reliable cloud service provider.
Google Cloud recommends you build your architecture to include:
- Measurable goals for reliability, so you can identify and remediate deficiencies
- Design for scalability, high availability, and disaster recovery
- Self-healing components wherever possible along with redundant failovers
- Processes that allow the infrastructure to run with little manual intervention and alarms to alert you to detect and mitigate failures
4. Performance Efficiency
Several components make up performance efficiency to manage computing resources efficiently even as resources and workload evolve.
Design principles for optimizing cloud performance include:
- Make technology more accessible (democratization of technology)
- Serverless architecture to minimize infrastructure management
- Consider mechanical sympathy to identify less-than-optimal conditions
5. Cost Optimization
While you do not want to sacrifice performance at any stage of your architecture, you do want to do your best to control costs. Optimize your infrastructure in the cloud to provide maximum resources and compute resources while minimizing expenditure.
Managing your costs starts with implementing cloud financial management practices. This includes:
- Balancing business goals with budget justifications
- Avoiding capital-intensive solutions
- Employ cost modeling practices to map costs throughout an organization
- Create alerts for budget thresholds and runovers
- Review cost optimization regularly
Since most cloud computing structures operate as pay-as-you-go, you aren’t necessarily overpaying for capacity you aren’t using. However, you may benefit from moving up or down in tiers and capacity. Reviewing your cost structure against usage and performance regularly can help optimize your costs.
Additional Benefits of a Well-Architected Framework
Building your infrastructure using these five pillars helps give you a robust, reliable, efficient, secure, and cost-efficient architecture. But there are other benefits as well, especially as you look ahead.
Risk Identification and Mitigation
Even once you have established your well-architected framework, it’s important to remember that things change. Regular reviews will help you assess each of these five pillars and identify risks and issues before they become problems. A well-architected framework gives you the tools you need to assess critical workloads and fix problems promptly.
Consistency
When everyone is using the same framework, it allows for greater consistency across your organization. This is especially important as roles change within a company or new hires are brought into the business.
Impact Evaluation
In an agile environment, applications are quickly developed, updated, and deployed. Changes always have the potential to introduce new variables into your infrastructure. The processes and the procedures employed with the well-architected framework can help you address potential impacts before changes occur.
Measure Improvement
This approach also provides a way to measure performance against your goals for continuous improvement. Successful teams develop not only benchmarks for performance, but goals for regular improvement. Continuously measuring performance against both benchmarks and goals can help you monitor and track improvements.
Deploying the Five Pillars
By deploying the five pillars of a well-architected framework, you take advantage of all the benefits of cloud resources. It helps infrastructure and application designers to think cloud-first. Cloud-native applications will run more efficiently in the cloud.
This infrastructure also provides increased visibility into each aspect of cloud and resource management, which sets the stage for faster deployment and better strategic decision-making.
