The Well-Architected Framework (WAF) is a set of best practices and guidelines developed by AWS to help customers build and operate reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud. The WAF provides a structured approach for customers to evaluate their workloads against established best practices, identify areas for improvement, and make informed decisions about how to implement changes.
The WAF consists of five pillars:
👉Operational Excellence: This pillar focuses on improving the ability to run and monitor systems, and to continually improve processes and procedures.
👉Security: This pillar focuses on protecting information and systems, and ensuring compliance with relevant regulations and standards.
👉Reliability: This pillar focuses on ensuring that systems are resilient, can recover from failures, and can meet business requirements for availability and performance.
👉Performance Efficiency: This pillar focuses on optimizing resource utilization and ensuring that systems can scale to meet demand.
👉Cost Optimization: This pillar focuses on minimizing costs and maximizing the value of resources.
Explanation
Operational Excellence: This pillar is focused on enabling an organization to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures. It involves defining and automating processes, establishing procedures for change management, and monitoring the overall health of systems. Operational excellence also requires setting goals and metrics to measure progress, creating and maintaining runbooks, and establishing mechanisms for learning and continuous improvement.
Security: This pillar is focused on protecting assets and systems while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies. It involves identifying and prioritizing security risks, implementing security controls to mitigate those risks, and monitoring for security events. Security best practices also include employing identity and access management controls, implementing network security controls, encrypting data, and establishing incident response procedures.
Reliability: This pillar is focused on ensuring that systems can recover from failures and can meet business requirements for availability and performance. It involves building systems that can automatically recover from failures, setting service level objectives (SLOs) and service level agreements (SLAs), and implementing continuous testing and validation. Reliability also requires monitoring and logging systems to identify issues before they affect customers, and designing systems with a clear understanding of dependencies and their impact on overall system reliability.
Performance Efficiency: This pillar is focused on optimizing the use of computing resources to meet business needs in a cost-effective way. It involves understanding the performance characteristics of systems and identifying areas for optimization, such as by choosing the right instance types, configuring auto-scaling, and implementing load balancing. Performance efficiency also involves monitoring resource utilization and identifying opportunities to optimize workloads and minimize costs.
Cost Optimization: This pillar is focused on managing costs while delivering business value. It involves understanding the cost of different AWS services and making informed decisions about resource allocation, such as by choosing the right storage types, optimizing network usage, and implementing serverless architectures. Cost optimization also involves identifying and mitigating inefficiencies and waste, such as by removing unused resources, rightsizing instances, and leveraging AWS cost management tools.
