mehmetmgrsl / aws-wafrs-work

WIP

What is the AWS Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR)

• Clients often seek validation of their architecture's alignment with

  • AWS best practices,
  • inquiring about workload adequacy,
  • adherence to cloud best practices, and
  • solution implementation guidance.

• The AWS Well-Architected Framework addresses these concerns through its six pillars:

  1. Operational Excellence,
  2. Security,
  3. Reliability,
  4. Performance Efficiency,
  5. Cost Optimization, and
  6. Sustainability.

Why would we need do it? (7*)

• The ultimate goal of WAFR is to improve your systems' architecture so that these systems can better support business needs.

• Process:

  1. Start reviewing the current architecture and comparing it against best practices.
     • You do so by answering the review questions.
     • A set of questions for each pillar
     • Identify areas in the architecture that represent high, medium or low risks – More on that later
  2. Start working on resolving the risks on a priority-based approach by identifying the highest impact of these risks
  • Create an improvement plan to address them

Which Workloads should be reviewed? (8*)

1. Could cause damage to business reputation or revenue streams
2. Foundational Business Applications (Benefits, Payrolls etc)
3. Aggressive RPO/RTO
4. Data Security critical
5. Time-bound event-driven workloads (i.e Seper Bowl, Oscars, etc.)

6 Pillars

1. Operational Excelence

• Perform operations as code
• Make frequent, small, reversible changes
• Refine operations procedures frequently
• Anticipate failure
• Learn from all operational failures

2. Security

• Implement a Strong Identify Foundation
• Apply Securoty at all Layers
• Protect Data in Transit and at Rest
  • Encrypt data at rest
  • Use server-side encryption with provider managed keys
  • Encrypt data in transit

3. Reliability

• The ability of a workload to perform its reqired function:
  • correctly and
  • consistently over an expected period of time.

To do this, design principles are:

• Automatically recover from failure
• Test recovery procedures
• Scale horizontally to increase aggregate workload availability
• Stop guessing capity
• Manage change in automation
  • using IaC (CloudFormation or Terraform)

5. Cost Optimization

• Terminate unused resources
• Resize resources that are overprovisioned
• Automate shutdown on schedule

References:

1. https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/

2. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/how-to-perform-a-well-architected-framework-review-part1/

3. AWS Well-Architected for Startups - Cost Optimisation | Amazon Web Services

4. AWS Well-Architected for Startups - Security

5. AWS Well-Architected for Startups - Reliability

6. AWS Well-Architected for Startups - Operational Excellence

7. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/how-to-perform-a-well-architected-framework-review-part1/

8. How to Prepare for an AWS Well Architected Review - ThoughtfulTechy Cloud

9. AWS Well-Architected Framework - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/pdfs/wellarchitected/latest/framework/wellarchitected-framework.pdf