Cloud Computing Tutorial · Integration and Operations · Lesson 23 of 24

Well-Architected Design

The well-architected frameworks from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, and how to use their pillars to review a design.

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The pillars

The AWS Well-Architected Framework has six pillars; Azure and Google Cloud publish frameworks built on the same ideas.

Pillar	Ask
Operational excellence	Can we deploy, observe and improve safely?
Security	Least privilege, encryption, detection, response?
Reliability	Multi-AZ, recovery, quotas, tested failover?
Performance efficiency	Right services and sizes, measured?
Cost optimisation	Do we know and control what we spend?
Sustainability	Are we using resources efficiently?

Using it

Review each important workload against the pillars before launch and yearly after (the AWS Well-Architected Tool, Azure Well-Architected Review, and Google Cloud's Architecture Framework checklists help). Record the risks you accept and the ones you'll fix.

A lightweight pillar reviewTry it yourself

review = {
    "operational excellence": ["IaC for all resources", "deploys are automated", "runbooks exist"],
    "security": ["no long-lived keys", "buckets private", "CloudTrail + GuardDuty on"],
    "reliability": ["multi-AZ", "backups restored in a test this quarter", "quotas monitored"],
    "cost optimisation": ["resources tagged", "budgets with alerts"],
}
answers = {"IaC for all resources": True, "deploys are automated": True, "runbooks exist": False,
           "no long-lived keys": False, "buckets private": True, "CloudTrail + GuardDuty on": True,
           "multi-AZ": True, "backups restored in a test this quarter": False, "quotas monitored": False,
           "resources tagged": True, "budgets with alerts": True}
for pillar, checks in review.items():
    risks = [c for c in checks if not answers[c]]
    print(f"{pillar:23} {len(checks) - len(risks)}/{len(checks)}" + (f"  risks: {', '.join(risks)}" if risks else ""))

Output

operational excellence  2/3  risks: runbooks exist
security                2/3  risks: no long-lived keys
reliability             1/3  risks: backups restored in a test this quarter, quotas monitored
cost optimisation       2/2

Test yourself

Which pillar covers tested backups and multi-AZ deployment?

Security
Reliability
Cost optimisation
Sustainability

Show answer

Answer: Reliability

Reliability is about recovering from failures and meeting demand.

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