AWS Architecting & Ecosystem

• AWS Architecting & Ecosystem
  • Well Architected Framework General Guiding Principles
  • AWS Cloud Best Practices - Design Principles
  • Well Architected Framework 6 Pillars
    • 1. Operational Excellence
    • 2. Security
    • 3. Reliability
    • 4. Performance Efficiency
    • 5. Cost Optimization
    • 6. Sustainability
  • AWS Well-Architected Tool
  • AWS Right Sizing
  • AWS Ecosystem - Free resources
    • AWS Ecosystem - AWS Support
  • AWS Marketplace

Well Architected Framework General Guiding Principles

• Stop guessing your capacity needs
• Test systems at production scale
• Automate to make architectural experimentation easier
• Allow for evolutionary architectures
  • Design based on changing requirements
• Drive architectures using data
• Improve through game days
  • Simulate applications for flash sale days

AWS Cloud Best Practices - Design Principles

• Scalability: vertical & horizontal
• Disposable Resources: servers should be disposable & easily configured
• Automation: Serverless, Infrastructure as a Service, Auto Scaling…
• Loose Coupling:
  • Monolith are applications that do more and more over time, become bigger
  • Break it down into smaller, loosely coupled components
  • A change or a failure in one component should not cascade to other components
• Services, not Servers:
  • Don’t use just EC2
  • Use managed services, databases, serverless, etc..

Well Architected Framework 6 Pillars

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

1. Operational Excellence

• Includes the ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures
• Design Principles
  • Perform operations as code - Infrastructure as code
  • Annotate documentation - Automate the creation of annotated documentation after every build
  • Make frequent, small, reversible changes - So that in case of any failure, you can reverse it
  • Refine operations procedures frequently - And ensure that team members are familiar with it
  • Anticipate failure
  • Learn from all operational failures

2. Security

• Includes the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies
• Design Principles
  • Implement a strong identity foundation - Centralize privilege management and reduce (or even eliminate) reliance on long-term credentials - Principle of least privilege - IAM
  • Enable traceability - Integrate logs and metrics with systems to automatically respond and take action
  • Apply security at all layers - Like edge network, VPC, subnet, load balancer, every instance, operating system, and application
  • Automate security best practices
  • Protect data in transit and at rest - Encryption, tokenization, and access control
  • Keep people away from data - Reduce or eliminate the need for direct access or manual processing of data
  • Prepare for security events - Run incident response simulations and use tools with automation to increase your speed for detection, investigation, and recovery
  • Shared Responsibility Mode

3. Reliability

• Ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues
• Design Principles
  • Test recovery procedures - Use automation to simulate different failures or to recreate scenarios that led to failures before
  • Automatically recover from failure - Anticipate and remediate failures before they occur
  • Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability - Distribute requests across multiple, smaller resources to ensure that they don’t share a common point of failure
  • Stop guessing capacity - Maintain the optimal level to satisfy demand without over or under provisioning - Use Auto Scaling
  • Manage change in automation - Use automation to make changes to infrastructure

4. Performance Efficiency

• Includes the ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve
• Design Principles
  • Democratize advanced technologies - Advance technologies become services and hence you can focus more on product development
  • Go global in minutes - Easy deployment in multiple regions
  • Use serverless architectures - Avoid burden of managing servers
  • Experiment more often - Easy to carry out comparative testing
  • Mechanical sympathy - Be aware of all AWS services

5. Cost Optimization

• Includes the ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point
• Design Principles
  • Adopt a consumption mode - Pay only for what you use
  • Measure overall efficiency - Use CloudWatch
  • Stop spending money on data center operations - AWS does the infrastructure part and enables customer to focus on organization projects
  • Analyze and attribute expenditure - Accurate identification of system usage and costs, helps measure return on investment (ROI) - Make sure to use tags
  • Use managed and application level services to reduce cost of ownership - As managed services operate at cloud scale, they can offer a lower cost per transaction or service

6. Sustainability

• The sustainability pillar focuses on minimizing the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads.
• Design Principles
  • Understand your impact – establish performance indicators, evaluate improvements
  • Establish sustainability goals – Set long-term goals for each workload, model return on investment (ROI)
  • Maximize utilization – Right size each workload to maximize the energy efficiency of the underlying hardware and minimize idle resources.
  • Anticipate and adopt new, more efficient hardware and software offerings – and design for flexibility to adopt new technologies over time.
  • Use managed services – Shared services reduce the amount of infrastructure; Managed services help automate sustainability best practices as moving infrequent accessed data to cold storage and adjusting compute capacity.
  • Reduce the downstream impact of your cloud workloads – Reduce the amount of energy or resources required to use your services and reduce the need for your customers to upgrade their devices

AWS Well-Architected Tool

• Free tool to review your architectures against the 6 pillars Well-Architected Framework and adopt architectural best practices
• How does it work?
  • Select your workload and answer questions
  • Review your answers against the 6 pillars
  • Obtain advice: get videos and documentations, generate a report, see the results in a dashboard
• Let’s have a look: https://console.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected

AWS Right Sizing

• EC2 has many instance types, but choosing the most powerful instance type isn’t the best choice, because the cloud is elastic
• Right sizing is the process of matching instance types and sizes to your workload performance and capacity requirements at the lowest possible cost
• Scaling up is easy so always start small
• It’s also the process of looking at deployed instances and identifying opportunities to eliminate or downsize without compromising capacity or other requirements, which results in lower costs
• It’s important to Right Size…
  • before a Cloud Migration
  • continuously after the cloud onboarding process (requirements change over time)
• CloudWatch, Cost Explorer, Trusted Advisor, 3rd party tools can help

AWS Ecosystem - Free resources

• AWS Blogs: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/
• AWS Forums (community): https://forums.aws.amazon.com/index.jspa
• AWS Whitepapers & Guides: https://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers
• AWS Quick Starts: https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/
  • Automated, gold-standard deployments in the AWS Cloud
  • Build your production environment quickly with templates
  • Example: WordPress on AWS https://fwd.aws/P3yyv?did=qs_card&trk=qs_card
  • Leverages CloudFormation
• AWS Solutions: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/
  • Vetted Technology Solutions for the AWS Cloud
  • Example - AWS Landing Zone: secure, multi-account AWS environment
    • https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/implementations/aws-landing-zone/
    • “Replaced” by AWS Control Tower

AWS Ecosystem - AWS Support

DEVELOPER	BUSINESS	ENTERPRISE
Business hours email access to Cloud Support Associates	24x7 phone, email, and chat access to Cloud Support Engineers	Access to a Technical Account Manager (TAM)
General guidance: < 24 business hours	Production system impaired: < 4 hours	Concierge Support Team (for billing and account best practices)
System impaired: < 12 business hours	Production system down: < 1 hour	Business-critical system down: < 15 minutes

AWS Marketplace

• Digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors (3rd party)
• Example:
  • Custom AMI (custom OS, firewalls, technical solutions…)
  • CloudFormation templates
  • Software as a Service
  • Containers
• If you buy through the AWS Marketplace, it goes into your AWS bill
• You can sell your own solutions on the AWS Marketplace

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Download PDF :     AWS Cloud Practitioner Study Notes (PDF)