AWS Well-Architected Framework: The Five Pillars

When you’re migrating to the cloud, it’s critical to rely on best practices to ensure that your infrastructure is secure and resilient. That’s why, at Carbon60, we align to the Well-Architected Framework as a guiding principle for organizations migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS) .

The AWS Well-Architected Framework covers the key concepts, design principles, and best practices from an architectural standpoint for designing and running workloads in the AWS cloud. This framework is proven and trusted by organizations of all sizes spanning a variety of industry verticals.

To fully understand the AWS Well-Architected Framework, here’s a look at the five pillars that it covers.

Operational Excellence Pillar

The first pillar within the AWS Well-Architected Framework is Operational Excellence, and there are five design principles within it. 

These include:

• Performing operations as code. This limits human error and allows for consistent responses to events.
• Making small, frequent, and reversible changes. This increases the flow of productive and beneficial changes into your workload, and lessens the effect on your customers.
• Refining operations procedures frequently. This means finding opportunities to evolve and improve your procedures.
• Anticipating failure. This means testing your operations frequently. 
• Learning from all operational failures. This means sharing what is learned across teams and driving improvements. 

Operational excellence is all about running and monitoring your systems in a way that continually improves and benefits your operations.

Security Pillar

The next pillar within the AWS Well-Architected Framework is focused on protecting your data and your systems. From identity and access management and data protection, to incident response and detection, security and compliance in the cloud is critical.

At Carbon60, we believe in security and compliance by design, and understand the importance of maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of data, protecting systems, maintaining compliance, and putting controls in place to detect any security breaches or other events.

By aligning with the AWS Well-Architected Framework security pillar, we’re able to help organizations build and operate a cloud infrastructure that effectively protects both their data and systems.

Reliability Pillar

The reliability pillar within the AWS Well-Architected Framework hones in on making sure that workloads perform their intended function correctly, consistently, and as required.

The design principles within this pillar include using automation for recovery from failure, testing recovery procedures, scaling horizontally to increase workload availability, managing change in automation, and understanding capacity.

Working with our customers while following the AWS Well-Architected Framework, we’re able to help them achieve the right reliability and availability based on the needs of their business. 

Performance Efficiency Pillar

The AWS Well-Architected Framework next focuses on performance efficiency. This pillar is dedicated to the efficient use of IT and computing resources.

Topics within this pillar include selecting the right resource types and sizes depending on workload requirements, monitoring performance, and making the best and most informed decisions for efficiency as business needs change and technologies evolve.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework outlines a number of design principles for achieving this. They include:

• Using serverless architectures
• Experimenting frequently
• Using technology that aligns best with your goals
• Deploying your workload in multiple AWS regions
• Making technology implementation easier for your team

Using the AWS Well-Architected Framework, your organization can achieve performance efficiency to meet your business needs.

Cost Optimization Pillar

The final pillar within the AWS Well-Architected Framework is cost optimization. This pillar digs into understanding and controlling where money is being spent, selecting the right number of resource types and figuring out the most appropriate resources for your organization.

It also analyzes your spend over time, and helps you to understand how to scale to meet your business needs while staying within your budget.

Carbon60 is well equipped to help you optimize your managed AWS hosting solution for performance and cost.

Work with AWS Well-Architected Framework Experts 

By working with a partner like Carbon60 that not only understands the details within the AWS Well-Architected Framework, but has a seasoned and experienced team of experts, your organization will be able to achieve its business goals within the AWS cloud. 

Learn more about our Managed AWS Cloud offerings here.

Carbon60 is an MSP dedicated to helping businesses maximize the performance and security of their core application infrastructure using public and hosted private clouds.  As an AWS Consulting Partner, we have the experience and the expertise to support organizations wherever they might be on their cloud journey.