Best Practices When Designing AWS Architecture

AWS architecture is the way you design and implement your cloud applications using AWS services and resources. A well-designed AWS architecture can help you achieve your business goals, such as scalability, reliability, security, performance, and cost optimization.

However, designing an AWS architecture is not a one-size-fits-all process. It requires careful planning and consideration of various factors, such as your workload requirements, your existing infrastructure, your budget, and your future growth.

To help you design an effective AWS architecture, you can use the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which describes key concepts, design principles, and architectural best practices for building and running workloads in the cloud. The framework consists of five pillars:

1. Operational Excellence: The ability to run systems and gain insight into their operations in order to deliver business value and continuously improve supporting processes and procedures.
2. Security: The ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies.
3. Reliability: The ability to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues.
4. Performance Efficiency: The ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
5. Cost Optimization: The ability to avoid or eliminate unneeded cost or suboptimal resources.

Each pillar has a set of design principles that guide you on how to apply best practices in your AWS architecture. For example:

1. Operational Excellence: Perform operations as code; make frequent small reversible changes; refine operations procedures frequently; anticipate failure scenarios; learn from operational failures.
2. Security: Implement a strong identity foundation; enable traceability; apply security at all layers; automate security best practices; protect data in transit and at rest; keep people away from data; prepare for security events.
3. Reliability: Test recovery procedures; automatically recover from failure; scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability; stop guessing capacity; manage change in automation.
4. Performance Efficiency: Democratize advanced technologies; go global in minutes; use serverless architectures; experiment more often; consider mechanical sympathy (how well software works with hardware).
5. Cost Optimization: Adopt a consumption model (pay only for what you use); measure overall efficiency (how well resources are used); stop spending money on data center operations (such as power cooling); analyze spend over time (identify trends); use managed services (reduce cost of ownership).

By following these principles and using the tools provided by AWS, such as reference architectures, solutions, patterns, icons², Well-Architected Tool, Well-Architected Labs, you can design an AWS architecture that meets your needs.

I hope this blog post helps you understand some of the best practices when designing AWS architecture. If you have any questions or feedbacks about it please let me know 😊