Domain 1 of 4 · Chapter 2 of 4

Cloud Design Principles

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Included in this chapter:

  • What the Well-Architected Framework is
  • The six pillars and how they differ
  • Exam-pattern recognition

The six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework

PillarCore focusExample concern
Operational excellenceRun and monitor systems; continually improve processesAutomating deployments and observing workloads
SecurityProtect data, systems, and assetsIdentity management and encryption
ReliabilityRecover from failure and meet demandFault tolerance and recovery
Performance efficiencyUse computing resources efficiently as demand changesSelecting the right resource types and sizes
Cost optimizationDeliver business value at the lowest price pointEliminating unneeded spend and rightsizing
SustainabilityMinimize the environmental impact of workloadsMaximizing utilization and reducing waste
Cheat sheet

Cheat sheet

  • A Well-Architected review is a conversation, not an audit
  • The AWS Well-Architected Tool is free to use
  • The framework has exactly six pillars
  • Operational excellence runs and improves systems to deliver business value
  • Security protects data, systems, and assets
  • Reliability is a workload working correctly and recovering from failure
  • Performance efficiency uses resources efficiently as demand and tech change
  • Cost optimization delivers business value at the lowest price point
  • Sustainability minimizes the environmental impact of workloads
  • Sustainability is the newest pillar, added in 2021
  • Cost optimization and sustainability are separate pillars
  • Stop guessing your capacity needs: scale to real demand
  • Test systems at production scale, then decommission
  • Automate with architectural experimentation in mind
  • Consider evolutionary architectures
  • Drive architectures using data
  • Improve through game days
  • Balance trade-offs across pillars instead of maximizing one
  • Elastic Load Balancing spreads traffic across AZs and skips unhealthy targets
  • Use SQS to decouple components so they scale independently
  • RDS Multi-AZ keeps a synchronous standby with automatic failover
  • RDS failover redirects traffic by flipping the endpoint's DNS record
  • S3 Cross-Region Replication requires versioning on both buckets
  • Trusted Advisor checks an environment against best practices

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References

  1. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework/welcome.html
  2. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/userguide/intro.html
  3. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework/general-design-principles.html
  4. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework/the-pillars-of-the-framework.html
  5. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework/cost-optimization.html
  6. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/sustainability-pillar/sustainability-pillar.html