The design of cloud workloads can be a complex task, where a perfect and universal solution doesn’t exist. We should balance all the different trade-offs and find an optimal solution based on our context. But how does it work in practice? Which guiding principles should we follow? Which are the most important areas we should focus on?
In this blog, we will try to answer some of these questions by sharing a set of resources related to the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The Framework shares a set of methods to help you understand the pros and cons of decisions you make while building cloud systems. By following this resource, you will learn architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable systems in the cloud. The framework is constantly updated; it evolves as the technology landscape changes. Check out the latest updates from June 2024.
The AWS Well-Architected Framework is constantly updated across all six pillars. The security pillar added a new best practice area: application security (AppSec). In this session, you can learn about the best practices highlighted in this area. Review four key domains: organization and culture, security of the pipeline, security in the pipeline, and dependency management. Each area provides a set of principles that you can implement and provides a complete view of how you design, develop, build, deploy, and operate secure workloads in the cloud.
Figure 1. Security should be part of the end-to-end development process, and implementing best practices both in the application code as well as in the underlying infrastructure components.
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How can we integrate different systems as a consequence of an acquisition? Mergers and acquisitions operations bring different people with different backgrounds together, with a need of driving systems convergence. Both organization and technical challenges can arise in this scenario. The Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) Lens is a collection of customer-proven design principles, best practices, and prescriptive guidance to help you integrate the IT systems of two or more organizations. This lens helps companies follow AWS prescribed best practices during technical integration, drive cost optimization, and expedite merger and acquisition value realization.
Figure 2. If the seller company runs on another cloud platform or on-premises, the acquirer should plan a cloud migration while guaranteeing continuity of service.
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One of the best ways to become familiar with new concepts and methodologies consist of doing hands-on work to absorb the techniques properly. For each Let’s Architect! blog, we tend to share at least one workshop associated with the topic. The AWS Well-Architected Framework covers six different pillars, so today we share the AWS Well-Architected Labs to cover each area of the framework. Feel free to jump across the different workshops and start building!
Figure 3. Sustainability is one of the pillars in the framework. Asynchronous and scheduled processing are key techniques for improving the sustainability and costs of cloud architectures.
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Distributed systems are difficult to design. It’s even more difficult to test them and prove they are working. Formal methods enable the early discovery of design bugs that can escape the guardrails of design reviews and automated testing only to get uncovered in production. This video shows how AWS uses P, an open source, state machine–based programming language for formal modelling and analysis of distributed systems.
You can learn from AWS engineers and architects how to use P for your own applications to find bugs early in the development process and increase developer velocity. This tool is used in AWS to reason out the correctness of cloud services (for example, Amazon Simple Storage Service and Amazon DynamoDB).
Figure 4. An example of a distributed system for processing transactions.
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See you next time!
Thanks for reading! Hopefully, you got interesting insights into the methodologies for designing Well-Architected systems. In the next blog, we will talk about multi-region architectures. We will understand when they are actually needed, and which design principles should be applied.
To revisit any of our previous posts or explore the entire series, visit the Let’s Architect! page.