June 02, 2020

5 Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework

Pillars:

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

Security Pillar

  • Identity and access management (IAM)
  • Detective controls
  • Infrastructure protection
  • Data protection
  • Incident response
    • Design Principles
      • Implement security at all layers
      • Enable traceability
      • Apply principle of least privilege
      • Focus on securing your system
      • Automate security bbest practices

Reliability Pillar

  • Recover from issues/failures
  • Apply best practices in: (Reliability in the cloud 3 areas)
    1. Foundations
    2. Change management
    3. Failure management
  • Anticipate, respond, and prevent failures
    • Design Principles
      • Test recovery procedures
      • Automatically recover from failure
      • Scale horizontally
      • Stop guessing capacity
      • Manage change in automation

Performance Efficiency Pillar

  • Select customizable solutions
  • Review to continually innovate
  • Monitor AWS services
  • Consider the trade-offs
    • Design Principles
      • Democratize advanced technologies
      • Go global in minutes
      • Use a serverless architectures
      • Experiment more often
      • Have mechanical sympathy

Cost Optimization Pillar

  • Use cost-effective resources
  • Matching supply with demand
  • Increase expenditure awareness
  • Optimize over time
    • Design Principles
      • Adopt a consumption model
      • Measure overall efficiency
      • Reduce spending on data center operations
      • Analyze and attribute expenditure
      • Use managed services

Operational Excellence Pillar

  • Manage and automate changes
  • Respond to events
  • Define the standards
    • Design Principles
      • Perform operations as code
      • Annotate documentation
      • Make frequent, small, reversible changes
      • Refine operations prcedures frequently
      • Anticipate Failure
      • Learn from all operational failures

More detailed documentation at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/the-5-pillars-of-the-aws-well-architected-framework