The Six Pillars of AWS Well-Architected Framework

AWS Well-Architected framework is built around six foundational areas, also known as pillars, to help customers structure their applications in line with best practices that have become established.

In addition, the AWS Well-Architected framework isn’t exclusive to the AWS environment. You can use these pillars to evaluate your system in any environment, including other cloud platforms or even traditional computing environments. It was created by AWS, but it is not specific to AWS, so yes, this article you are reading will be useful at some point — wherever you might find yourself.

Quickly, we will walk over the six pillars of AWS Well-Architected framework, and see why they can be trusted to deliver a Well-Architected system. The pillars are:

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

The Six (6) Pillars of AWS Well-Architected Framework

Why can these six pillars be trusted to deliver a superb solution?

Each of these six pillars has been further broken down into sets of Design Principles and Best Practices if you are interested in learning a lot more about the framework. However, I will highlight the questions that are provided in the AWS Well-Architected Framework here. Some questions have been put together in each of these pillars to help you understand where your system currently stands. When performing reviews with the AWS Well-Architected Tool, these are the questions you will have to answer concerning your business.

Sometimes, the question doesn’t apply to you (maybe it is a cloud-specific question while you have an on-premise workload or something similar) and you don’t need to answer that question, but when you look through everything, you can see the strengths of your system, the areas you need to improve on ASAP, and the nice-to-haves you will like to implement down the line. These pillars can help you review your existing workload for improvements or guide you while you architect a new workload.

Cost Optimization

1. How do you implement cloud financial management?
2. How do you govern usage?
3. How do you monitor usage and cost?
4. How do you decommission resources?

Operational Excellence

1. How do you determine what your priorities are?
2. How do you structure your organization to support your business outcomes?
3. How does your organizational culture support your business outcomes?
4. How do you design your workload so that you can understand its state?
5. How do you reduce defects, ease remediation, and improve flow into production?
6. How do you mitigate deployment risks?
7. How do you know that you are ready to support a workload?
8. How do you understand the health of your workload?
9. How do you understand the health of your operations?
10. How do you manage workload and operations events?
11. How do you evolve operations?

Reliability

1. How do you manage service quotas and constraints?
2. How do you plan your network topology?
3. How do you design your workload service architecture?
4. How do you design interactions in a distributed system to prevent failures?
5. How do you design interactions in a distributed system to mitigate or withstand failures?
6. How do you monitor workload resources?
7. How do you design your workload to adapt to changes in demand?
8. How do you implement change?
9. How do you back up data?
10. How do you use fault isolation to protect your workload?
11. How do you design your workload to withstand component failures?
12. How do you test reliability?
13. How do you plan for disaster recovery (DR)?

Performance Efficiency

1. How do you select the best-performing architecture?
2. How do you select your compute solution?
3. How do you select your storage solution?
4. How do you select your database solution?
5. How do you configure your networking solution?
6. How do you evolve your workload to take advantage of new releases?
7. How do you monitor your resources to ensure they are performing?
8. How do you use tradeoffs to improve performance?

Security

1. How do you securely operate your workload?
2. How do you manage identities for people and machines?
3. How do you manage permissions for people and machines?
4. How do you detect and investigate security events?
5. How do you protect your network resources?
6. How do you protect your compute resources?
7. How do you classify your data?
8. How do you protect your data at rest?
9. How do you protect your data in transit?
10. How do you anticipate, respond to, and recover from incidents?

Sustainability

1. How do you select regions to support your sustainability goals?
2. How do you take advantage of user behavior patterns to support your sustainability goals?
3. How do you take advantage of software and architecture patterns to support your sustainability goals?
4. How do you take advantage of data access and usage patterns to support your sustainability goals?
5. How do your hardware management and usage practices support your sustainability goals?
6. How do your development and deployment processes support your sustainability goals?

As you examine the questions under each pillar, you will gain insight into what you should focus on and how it is currently implemented in your workload, enabling you to evaluate your architecture (current or proposed) in comparison to AWS Well-Architected best practices.

After going through these pillars, you will notice that these questions ask “ HOW do you do this?”. You might be monitoring usage and costs already but is your method ideal for your workload? Your “HOW” should be analyzed by someone trained in AWS Well-Architected best practices to identify any areas that can be improved.

Finally, I will like to point out that in your particular business scenario, the perfect solution might involve trade-offs between these pillars and that is fine. Two pillars that I learned not to trade-off though are the Security and Operational Excellence pillars because even while you have some particular pillar as a priority for your workload in your business, your environment should remain secure and uncompromised, and you want to keep improving whatever you have set up and only grow forward. I advise that you always keep these two pillars as part of your priority when architecting your system because they allow other pillars that are important to you to work even better.

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