Eliminating resource wastage is a low-hanging fruit that contributes the most to your sustainability goals. A subsequent step is to maximize the utilization of provisioned resources by optimizing software design and architecture, which leads to lower energy consumption. Idling resources in CI/CD pipeline execution environments are good candidates for first-level optimizations, after which teams can focus on individual applications.
Leveraging a shared pool of managed service resources
Resource sharing by multiple customers results in optimal usage of data center infrastructure and thereby allows AWS to reduce the sustainability impact by making decisions that benefit a large group of customers. For example, when migrating applications to managed services such as AWS Fargate serverless, customers benefit from shared data center resources such as power and networking, efficiently handled by AWS on a large scale.
Summary
In this chapter, we delved into the fundamental principles and significance of AWS Well-Architected, which serves as a comprehensive guide for designing and operating reliable, performant, cost-effective, secure, and sustainable cloud systems.
We started with a discussion of different components of AWS Well-Architected—the framework, the lenses, and the Well- Architected Tool. An important takeaway from all these learnings is that it is an evolving concept. The cloud provider will keep on extending the framework and the suggestions under each of the pillars as the cloud capabilities evolve and by looking at how different customers use these capabilities to solve their unique business problems. The lenses additionally provide focused attention on a particular business or technical domain that customer workloads map to. Documenting workload evaluations and learnings based on Well-Architected suggestions is an important activity that is fulfilled by the use of the Well-Architected Tool. Only then can you continually measure progress and identify the drivers of certain architectural decisions for your future team members.
In the last section of the chapter, we focused on the six pillars of the framework and covered organizational best practices under each of them. These practices serve as a guiding path toward the most important aspects an enterprise should consider on its AWS cloud journey. For each of these pillars, we also covered an example implementation workflow that highlighted common use cases that apply to most enterprises.
As a DevOps practitioner, it’s important that you advocate the adoption of these practices and continuous evaluation of workloads against the Well-Architected Framework. At the same time, it is equally important to discourage the use of Well-Architected as an audit or blame mechanism.
I hope these learnings will help you create a strong AWS foundation on which you can base your processes and technical architectures. Establishing a continuous improvement culture based on learnings from how other customers have used AWS services will additionally enable you to solve organizational needs of reliable, cost-effective, secure, and sustainable cloud systems.
Further reading
Here are some case studies outlining the benefits that three companies realized, with the adoption of the AWS Well-Architected Framework and practices:
- https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/moots-technology-wa-case-study/
- https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/well-architected-natura-case-study-en/
- https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/bmc-software-wa/