Well-Architected is an AWS offering that grants customers access to the wealth of knowledge acquired through numerous architectural reviews with other customers, over the years. This ensures that customers are well informed about the most effective practices and can mitigate architectural risks their applications might be exposed to. With Well-Architected, organizations can identify areas within their architecture that need enhancement, thereby allowing them to address and overcome ongoing challenges that divert their focus from value-adding activities.
In essence, it serves as a mechanism for organizations to achieve the following:
- Acquire insights into effective strategies and best practices for cloud-based architecture
- Assess their architecture against established best practices
- Enhance their architecture by resolving any identified issues
There are three main components of AWS Well-Architected—the framework itself, Well-Architected Lenses, and the Well-Architected Tool. Let’s discuss them in detail.
The AWS Well-Architected Framework
The Well-Architected Framework offers a collection of questions for customers to assess their architecture and its alignment with AWS best practices. Learning from what has worked well for other AWS customers in the past avoids the need to reinvent the wheel and provides a consistent approach that can be leveraged to architect modern cloud-based systems that are secure, cost-effective, efficient, reliable, and sustainable. As new application patterns evolve, this framework is going to continuously adapt to them. Therefore, it is necessary to look at this as an ongoing activity where you can continuously measure progress and ensure that you are moving in the right direction.
To categorize these learnings into well-defined focus areas, AWS Well-Architected uses six key pillars, which we will cover in the upcoming sections.
AWS Well-Architected lenses
To evaluate your architectures against a well-defined technical or business scope and context, there are dedicated lenses that can be leveraged. AWS Well-Architected Lenses expand on the advice provided by the AWS Well-Architected Framework and cater to distinct industry verticals and technology domains. Depending on the nature of your applications, you can assess them against business verticals such as financial services, media streaming, or healthcare, or you could also assess technical maturity aroundtopics such as hybrid networking, high-performance computing, containers, or SaaS (Software as a Service) capabilities.
As a DevOps professional, you can leverage these lenses and align application design, deployment, and operational activities to ensure that your applications will meet the business needs when deployed on AWS. The lenses add a new dimension to each of the six pillars covered in the framework.
Let’s take an example of the SaaS lens for the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It is targeted toward customers that host SaaS applications on the cloud. Diving into common areas of concerns that multi-tenant SaaS applications have, such as data isolation, noisy neighbor problems, tenant onboarding, and tenant consumption, the lens provides best practices around how to solve these problems by leveraging AWS services and mechanisms. These lenses provide prescriptive guidance that can help you solidify your workloads’ security, resiliency, and availability while reducing the overall cost.
In the previous chapter, Chapter 11, Ensuring a Strong AWS Foundation for Multi-Account and Multi-Region Environments, we covered the concept of a landing zone. To identify best practices for themanagement and governance of your multi-account environment, there is a dedicated guide in the AWS Well-Architected Framework that outlines various aspects of networking, security, identity management, and monitoring that you should consider. Refer to the following link for more details: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/management-and-governance-guide/management-and-governance-cloud-environment-guide.html.