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AWS Well-Architected Framework Elevates Agility

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What started as a white paper from AWS, the Well-Architected Framework has evolved into a large ecosystem of partners and more

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In the past year, agility has become one of the most prized IT attributes as organizations race to deploy more workloads in the cloud. There is a paradox, however: The faster organizations deploy applications, the more likely mistakes will be made. Cloud computing deployments are rife with misconfigurations that are the direct result of developers provisioning cloud infrastructure rapidly and incorrectly. Application environments are almost never as efficient as they could be.

The challenge and the opportunity IT teams now face is defining a set of best practices for securely and consistently deploying application workloads on cloud infrastructures that complement and extend agile development methodologies. IT organizations should not have to slow down application development and deployment because of security concerns. Identifying high-risk issues (HRIs) and being able to consistently achieve and maintain security without sacrificing agility is an absolute requirement.

It seems that Amazon Web Services (AWS) couldn’t agree more. The cloud leader has defined the AWS Well-Architected Framework to help organizations build workloads on AWS that are secure, efficient, reliable, cost-optimized and operationally excellent.

Through this effort, AWS hopes IT organizations benefit from removing the guesswork for building workloads on cloud. Cloud misconfiguration mistakes that conspire to make organizations question their commitment to agile development methodologies are eliminated. The only remaining issue is finding a set of tools that turn those AWS guidelines into a set of policies that can be achieved and enforced easily.

Agile Meets Well-Architected

In addition to making it possible to build and deploy applications faster, agile development methodologies make it possible to test the application code. IT teams gain unprecedented visibility into how applications behave. The equivalent of an application development methodology for managing cloud infrastructure is the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

The Well-Architected Framework is battle-tested, based on best practices AWS has observed over its 14-year history. The pillars of the Well-Architected Framework are:

  1. Operational Excellence: Under this pillar, operations teams need to understand their business and customer needs so they can support business outcomes. Operations teams create and use procedures to respond to operational events and then validate their effectiveness to support business needs. Those teams also collect metrics that are used to measure the achievement of desired business outcomes. It’s important to design operations to support evolution in response to change and to incorporate lessons learned through their performance.
  2. Security: This pillar focuses on the importance of putting in place practices that influence security before any workload is architected. IT teams need to control who can do what. In addition, they need to be able to identify security incidents, protect systems and services, and maintain the confidentiality and integrity of data through data protection.
  3. Reliability: This pillar encompasses the ability of a workload to perform its intended function correctly and consistently when it’s expected to. This includes the ability to operate and test the workload through its total life cycle. The workload architecture of the distributed system must be designed to prevent and mitigate failures, handle changes in demand or requirements and be able to detect failures and automatically heal itself.
  4. Performance Efficiency: This pillar addresses the need to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve. Teams must gather data on all aspects of the architecture, from the high-level design to the selection and configuration of resource types and make trade-offs in their architecture to improve performance, such as using compression or caching or relaxing consistency requirements.
  5. Cost Optimization: This pillar focuses on how to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point. Design decisions are sometimes directed by haste rather than data, and it can be tempting to overcompensate rather than spend time performing benchmarking to determine the most cost-optimal deployment. As a result, deployments can be both overprovisioned and underutilized. Using the appropriate services, resources and configurations for workloads is key to cost savings.

Each of these pillars requires tools to enable DevOps teams to proactively manage their cloud environments—not only by provisioning and deploying applications faster but also by making more informed decisions when considering trade-offs between performance, reliability, cost and security. It’s a balance as rarely are these decisions independent of each other.

The COVID-19 Imperative

The COVID-19 pandemic has made the Well-Architected Framework essential. The number of workloads being deployed on AWS has increased sharply as organizations of all sizes accelerate digital business transformation initiatives. IT projects that once were expected to take months to complete now are expected to be up and running in a matter of weeks.

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The number of application initiatives underway has increased as well. Organizations are trying to maximize their IT budget like never before as the number of applications being deployed on AWS increases steadily. IT dollars need to go further than ever, at a time most digital business initiatives are still relatively nascent in their ability to drive revenue.

Cloud optimization is now an absolute necessity. The days are over when organizations could afford to allow developers to spin up virtual machines randomly. Every dollar spent on cloud resources needs to provide a quantifiable return on that investment.

How and Why Mistakes Are Made

Of course, haste makes waste. Applications that are built and deployed quickly inevitably wind up not only consuming more resources than required but also are rife with mistakes. Cloud services are riddled with misconfigurations. In addition, developers routinely employ open source tools such as Terraform or vendor tools such as AWS CloudFormation to programmatically provision cloud infrastructure, and while managing IT infrastructure as code absolutely increases productivity, too many developers aren’t familiar with the best practices for securing that type of infrastructure. It’s not uncommon for ports to be left wide open simply because a developer assumed the cloud service provider would take care of that task on their behalf.

AWS is committed to making sure its platform is secure. The security of the overall environment is a shared responsibility between AWS and its customers. It’s up to each IT organization to make sure the applications they deploy don’t inadvertently expose a vulnerability that could be easily exploited. And it’s up to each DevOps team to ensure applications are deployed reliably and securely without slowing down the deployment rate of those applications.

For its part, AWS provides financial incentives to get Well-Architected in the form of account credits provided directly to the customer when they implement recommended remediations identified during a Well-Architected Framework Review—an assessment using these best practices guidelines. Customers typically use these credits to offset costs or add the latest AWS services.

How nOps Resolves Cloud Issues

nOps provides DevOps teams with an integrated SaaS platform to monitor, analyze and optimize AWS changes, security, performance, reliability and operational excellence while optimizing costs. DevOps teams gain continuous insights into their AWS infrastructure health informed by an always-on, automated discovery process using Well-Architected guidelines, and cloud consultants use it to run AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviews with their customers.

As an AWS ISV partner, nOps is unique in architecting its platform to align directly with the five pillars of the Well-Architected Framework. There are features that solutions architects love instantly, such as auto-discovery of high-risk issues (HRIs) and dashboards aligned with the Well-Architected pillars that let them instantly drill down to the resource level for fast root-cause analysis. But its real value is helping AWS customers and partners be smart when evaluating the pros and cons of their decisions when balancing cost, security and performance.

nOps is committed to helping IT teams optimally manage AWS environments as cost-effectively as possible. The continuous feedback provided by nOps enables DevOps teams to make sure that once operational excellence is achieved, there is no sliding back.

A Well-Architected Movement

The Well-Architected Framework is being adopted broadly. What started as a white paper now includes hands-on labs, AWS and third-party tools, an ecosystem of trained partners and a broad AWS company  mantra. The principles defined by AWS are being applied broadly in the industry with the help of solution providers including nOps and hundreds of consulting partners certified on Well-Architected. We’re at the beginning of a new era of cloud computing that leverages automation to achieve a level of operational excellence never before possible. We’re committed to partnering with IT teams large and small to make that vision a reality.

IT organizations that regularly conduct Well-Architected Framework Reviews will be recognized by vendors and peers alike as one of an elite cadre of IT professionals that have mastered AWS to optimize their modern infrastructure for business agility.

View the AWS Well-Architected webinar and check out nOps to see how it can support your Well-Architected agenda.

This sponsored article was written on behalf of nOps.