Most modern businesses depend on a portfolio of technology solutions to operate and be successful every day. How do you know whether your team is following best practices or what the risks are in your architectures? This session shows how the AWS Well-Architected Framework provides prescriptive advice on best practices and how the AWS Well-Architected Tool enables you to measure and improve your technology portfolio. We explain how other customers are using AWS Well-Architected in their businesses, and we share what we learned from reviewing tens of thousands of architectures across operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.

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Introduction to the Well-Architected
Framework and Tool
Rodney Lester
Reliability Technical Lead/Pillars Knowledge and Integration Lead
AWS Well-Architected
S V C 2 0 8

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Building an application

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When you look at the system your team
is building, can you answer the question:
“Are you Well-Architected?”

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Are you Well-Architected?
Security Reliability
Performance
efficiency
Cost
optimization
Operations

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Are you Well-Architected?
Security Reliability
Performance
efficiency
Cost
optimizationOperations
Review
process
Consistent Technology
portfolio

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https://aws.amazon.com/well-architected/
AWS Well-Architected

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A little bit of history...

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History
Well-Architected
started
2012
Questions across
four pillars
2014
Operational
excellence
2016
Self-service,
imp. plans
2018
AWS SA reviews
2013
Published framework
2015
APN partners, lens
2017 2019

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AWS Well-Architected Framework

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Why AWS
Well-Architected
Framework?
Learn AWS best practices
Build and deploy faster
Lower or mitigate risks
Make informed decisions

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A mechanism for your cloud journey
Learn Measure Improve

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What is the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
Design principles QuestionsPillars

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Pillars of AWS Well-Architected
Security Reliability
Performance
efficiency
Cost
optimization
Operational
excellence

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Design principles
General
design principles
Pillar-specific
design principles
Automate responses to security events: Monitor and automatically trigger
responses to event-driven or condition-driven alerts

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Pillar area
Question
Context
Best practices
Questions
Failure management

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What is available?
Helpful resources
Videos
Inline glossary
Workloads
Review (Q&A)
Dashboard
Report (PDF)
Review approach
Self-service
Partner
SA-led
Resources from partners
APN
Marketplace
Improvement plans
Framework
• Design principles
Pillars (areas)
• Design principles
• Questions
• Best practices
Whitepapers (PDF, Kindle)
Training
Website
Document workloads
• Description
• Regions
• Pillar priority
Review
• Rating
• Answers
• Notes
• Milestones
Tool Data
Content

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AWS Well-Architected Tool

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AWS Well-Architected Tool

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AWS Well-Architected Tool

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Demo
https://aws.amazon.com/well-architected-tool/

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Intent of review
Working together to
improve
Not an audit
Throughout
life cycle
Not a one-time check
Pragmatic,
proven advice
Not architecture astronauts

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Not a one-time check
• Read whitepaper before design
• At minimum: questions
• Iterate through life cycle
• Half way (or sooner)
• Close to launch
• Post launch
Throughout
life cycle
Not a one-time check

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AWS Solutions
Architect
AWS
APN partner
AWS
WA tool
Your team technical
and business leads
Self-service
Partner
AWS SA
Review choice

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Review choice
Self-service
Full control of how often and when
Partner
When you have a shortage of skilled resource, can address issues
AWS SA
Critical workloads, advice on improvement plan

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Partner Well-Architected reviews
Results including
Statement of Work (SoW)
for improvements
Approve SoW within
30 days receive $5,000
in AWS credits
Engage with a
Well-Architected partner
for a free review

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Well-Architected Partners
https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/partners/

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Learnings
Earlier
is better
Pre-launch only?
Not considered
decisions
Make bad decisions?
Most workloads
can be improved
Findings?

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Use cases
Portfolio
management
Technology
governance
Learning best practices for
the cloud

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How do I architect for the cloud?
Being constrained by on-premises assumptions
So many resources, where to start?
How do I know if I have done something wrong?
Question:
Learning best practices for the cloud

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Answer:
Learningbest practicesfor the cloud
Learn AWS best practices
Transition to cloud native
Sign-post resources/services
Identify improvements
Inform future architectures

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Question:
Technologygovernance
Ready to go into production?
Are my teams following best practices?
Consistent measurement?
Burn down risks?

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Answer:
Technologygovernance
Security Reliability
Performance
efficiency
Cost
optimizationOperations
Review
process
Consistent Technology
portfolio

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Question:
Portfoliomanagement
Where is my inventory of workloads?
What decisions did I make in each?
What risks are in each?
How are risks changing over time?
Where should I invest?
Are there trends I can address holistically?
Can I build mechanisms?

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Answer:
Portfoliomanagement
Technology portfolio
Security Reliability
Performance
efficiency
Cost
optimizationOperations

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Tips
https://aws.amazon.com/well-architected/
Whitepapers (PDF, Kindle)
• Framework
• Per pillar (operational excellence, reliability,
security, performance efficiency, cost optimization)
• Lens (serverless, HPC, IoT)
Training (framework, pillars, review process, tool)
Website
• Glossary
• Videos
• Map

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Framework has Q&A
https://aws.amazon.com/well-architected/

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Pillar has detail
https://aws.amazon.com/well-architected/

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Lens have ref. arch
https://aws.amazon.com/well-architected/

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Free training
https://aws.amazon.com/well-architected/
The Framework
Operational Excellence
Security
Reliability
Performance Efficiency
Cost Optimization
Well-Architected Review
AWS Well-Architected Tool

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Pillar priority
https://aws.amazon.com/well-architected/

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Well-Architected content website
https://wa.aws.amazon.com/

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Well-Architected Labs
https://github.com/awslabs/aws-well-architected-labs

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General design principles
Stop guessing your capacity needs
Test systems at production scale
Automate to make architectural experimentation easier
Allow for evolutionary architectures
Drive architectures using data
Improve through game days

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Design principles
for operational excellence
Perform operations as code
Annotate documentation
Make frequent, small, reversible changes
Refine operations procedures frequently
Anticipate failure
Learn from all operational failures

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Design principles
for security
Implement a strong identity foundation
Enable traceability
Apply security at all layers
Automate security best practices
Protect data in transit and at rest
Keep people away from data
Prepare for security events

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Design principles
for reliability
Test recovery procedures
Automatically recover from failure
Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability
Stop guessing capacity
Manage change in automation

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Design principles
for performance efficiency
Democratize advanced technologies
Go global in minutes
Use serverless architectures
Experiment more often
Mechanical sympathy

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Design principles
for cost optimization
Adopt a consumption model
Measure overall efficiency
Stop spending money on datacenter operations
Analyze and attribute expenditure
Use managed services to reduce cost of ownership

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Best Practices
Read the whitepaper before you start
Iterate through the questions
identify actions and back log
Review pre-launch
Review/iterate post launch

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Getting started
https://aws.amazon.com/well-architected/
Review first workloadAccount team or partnerRead online resources

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Next Step
Start using the tool:
https://aws.amazon.com/well-architected/

53. Thank you!
S U M M I T © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Rodney Lester
rodneyle@amazon.com