Architecture : AWS Introduction-1- Well-Architected perspective – Pranav – Medium

AWS Introduction-1- Well-Architected perspective

AWS is undisputed leader of cloud as of today at least. In this series I will explain AWS services and how they are applied to achieve business agility and always-on organization.

I assume you have basic understanding of cloud computing.

Cloud computing is the way to outsource your computing services via pay-as-you go pricing model. In nutshell you don’t need to worry about filling templates to provision a server hence you are completely eradicating the process of cumbersome capacity planning. Well, that is service-driven world and in the world of rapidly changing business needs, this makes absolute sense.
From bird’s eye view there are five broad categories of AWS services.
Of-course, you can categorize further in terms of operational efficiency, Developer tools, AR, ML etc. However to keep it simple lets start with basics.

Service Categories

1. Compute
2. Storage
3. Networking
4. Database
5. Analytics

Lets invert a bit and understand the design principles which underpins these services.You can think of these design principles as a guide to construct blueprint of your cloud architecture. Primarily this leads to set of questions which you can ask while designing your cloud architecture. Then there are different architecture pillars which form the foundation of the AWS well-architected framework

General design principles

1. Stop guessing your capacity needs
Gone are the days when you have to go perform rigorous capacity planning at the beginning of the project and get required approvals for the Infra footprint upcoming project would create. Cloud has certainly addressed this problem by unleashing elasticity where you can scale up and down services at your convenience virtually freeing you from any guesswork. In nutshell, if you design carefully you won’t pay for the idle resources.
2.Test systems at production scale
To simulate production-scale testing, you can create and kill environment as per need. Therefore you dont need to worry about infra needs for your testing environment. We will talk about it in upcoming posts as this brings huge flexibility on the table which traditional data centers can never provide.
3. Automate to make architectural decision easier
It is always advisable to automate architecture decision. Never ever keep it manual else amount of benefits from cloud will be beyond your reach.
4.Allow for evolutionary architecture
Business demands agility and to create agility architecture needs to evolve. Cloud computing gives right platform to the architecture to evolve and grow. This is not a one time event now.

5. Drive architecture using data
There are lot of services where you can collect architecture feedback and analyze them. You may get interesting insights at very low cost which again will serve as input to your architecture decision. AWS has interesting services like cloudwatch which you can use to build log analytics and get real time view of your architecture at run-time.

6. Improve through game days

You can simulate huge load to test resilience and improve on that. Netflix has mastered this art of building services which kill systems in production at real-time. You can get confidence on your architecture by testing resiliency in the production.

AWS is standing tall and ever growing on these design principles and robust foundation of the architecture pillars. These design principles are prerequisite of an evolutionary cloud architecture. Each of these pillars have their core principles which are specific to the pillars. It is critical to understand those principles before jumping to the services and always look at the services from the prism of these principles. Next few posts would address how you can efficiently design your architecture with AWS services and utilizing principals of well-architected framework.
These pillars are core of the AWS well-architected framework and are guiding force behind laying out a structured approach towards cloud architecture setup. It is very very essential to understand these pillars and principals behind them.

AWS Well-Architected Framework Pillars

1. Operational Excellence
2. Security
3. Reliability
4. Performance Efficiency
5. Cost Optimization