If you are using AWS you must have heard of the Well-Architected Framework by now. The framework has five pillars.
- Operational Excellence
- Security
- Reliability
- Performance Efficiency
- Cost Optimisation
The framework is well documented in detail and there are labs available if you would like to learn about the process and the tool. There are various lenses you can apply to your workload as well.
The Well-Architected tool is available in the AWS dashboard. It can be quite daunting to go through the questions and customers often never go through it because they don’t know where/how to start. In this post, I will discuss the process I go though with my customers to lead them towards a Well-Architected Solution.
Pick a Workload
The Well-Architected questions can apply to all of your AWS workloads but it will be very very difficult to improve if you consider all workloads. The scope becomes too big and you will find it hard to implement any changes recommended by the tool.
A well planned Well-Architected Review starts with a specific workload. Gather as much information (architecture, configuration, etc) about the workload before the review. What is a workload though? It can be a service or set of services that forms a solution eg. a web service running on EC2 instance, fronted by a Load Balancer and backed by an RDS database instance or an API running on lambda behind an API-Gateway backed by a DynamoDB table. Know the limits of your workloads and stay within those limits during the review.
But I don’t have all the information about the Workload
A team is typically responsible for various tasks related to the workload (development, deployment, configuration, operations, security etc). It is normal to not know everything. The key is to gather all relevant people in the room for the review.
Know the business priority
A Well-Architected Review will mean nothing if it doesn’t solve problems for the business. The technical and business leaders can help fill the gap in terms for identifying the current priorities for the business.
Where do I start?
Knowing the business priorities for the workload will help you determine where to focus or specifically which pillar to focus on. If the business is often complaining about the workload being too expensive focus on the Cost Optimisation pillar or the workload contains sensitive data and the business is not confident if the data is securely stored and transmitted, focus on the Security pillar, you get the idea.
You can achieve more by focusing on the business priorities. It gives you a starting point and sets the objectives for the review (why are you doing this review?)
Prioritise the recommendations
The Well-Architected Tool typically produces lots of recommendations and there is often not enough time and budget to work on all the recommendations. Rank these recommendations in order of high to low priority for the business. This will act as your backlog, now determine if there are any easily achievable tasks that have high priority that will give you biggest bang for your buck eg. creating a Budget and Alarms.
Time for Action
Gather your troops and assign them tasks from the backlog to improve the workload. The Well-Architected Review is an iterative process, once you have implemented the first round of recommendations, come back to the tool and update the questionnaire.
The first review is always the hardest plan it well.
- keep it interactive
- allow at least 3–4 hours
- plan for breaks
- bring food (always helps)
- keep it clean (no blame environment)
Hope you are thinking of conducting a review in near future. You can always reach out to AWS or any partners such as Consegna for help. Let me know your thoughts.
