At times in the middle of a project, one common thought that crosses every technical architect is that if their design approach is up to date, complies to industry standards and uses industry best practices. Wondered if there are any tools that can help you in reviewing the current state of the workload and best in the industry standards and practices? AWS Well-Architected Framework is the answer.
AWS Well-Architected Framework
AWS Well-Architected helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for a variety of applications and workloads. Built around six pillars—operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability—AWS Well-Architected provides a consistent approach for customers and partners to evaluate architectures and implement scalable designs.
The AWS Well-Architected Framework includes domain-specific lenses, hands-on labs, and the AWS Well-Architected Tool.
AWS Well-Architected Tool – what is this and what does this contain?
· It is used to define the chosen workload for the review
· Explore the current architectural and implementation state of the workload
· Tool does not expect any customer CI/PI info and hence can be shared with stakeholders
· WA review in the tool is based on set of several questions in each pillar
· Questions are based on several years of experiences and architectural best-practices observed from several hundreds of clients
· Each pillar has set of questions as a checklist and checked if the best-practice is followed
· If the best-practice is not followed, then it can be left unchecked
· Overall, 60 questions are available across all the pillars together
· Choosing Custom Lenses can add more questions to the review
How to choose the workloads?
This is the most common question that comes from the client teams when there are several workloads. Below are our recommendations on how to choose a workload:
· A workload which is in production or going-to-production soon
· Based on the business criticality, the workload can be chosen for review
· A workload with both Application and Data is better than either Application or Data
· Workload which is in its design build state
Profiles
· This is very new feature introduced by AWS in the tool
· Helps customers prioritize which questions to focus on first by providing a list of prioritized questions
· These questions are aligned with the business goals and outcomes.
Best practices around using the WA Review Tool
· Review can be full or partial: You can choose the right pillars or more based on the workload
· Make sure your assumptions are recorded in the Notes window to help peer-reviewers
· Don’t put any customer identifiable or customer specific info
· Keep the observations with generic comments but detail as much possible
· In any item is left unchecked, ensure you address the reason for the same
· In case of any is outside the scope, specify as out of scope by choosing the question does not apply to this workload option
Custom Lenses in WA Tool
· Tailor guidance with AWS provided Custom Lenses: Serverless Lens and SaaS Lens
· Lenses adds more specific questions in those areas to make the review more effective
· WA Tool allows to create custom lens and add your own set of questions based on several categories
· IBM has built Custom Lens for reviewing the Sustainable App Modernization workloads, more details here
Templates
Different teams within an organization focuses on various aspects of cloud development, example, Infra team is responsible for building infra while finance team is focussing on Cloud Financial Management aspects and Security team is working on defining the security policies. The workload development teams might not have complete visibility on the other aspects and while reviewing the workloads using WA tool, it raises many questions whether the organization is really following the best practices. Templates approach solves these issues. Once answers are templatized, it can be reused across multiple workload reviews and the reviewers need not run behind the other dependent teams seeking answers to the same questions again and again. This helps in accelerating the review process and fill the gaps where workload development has no visibility across other functional teams in the organization.
Review Process
During the review, presence of right stakeholders is extremely important to understand the current state of the workload, perform effective reviews and provide appropriate recommendations for improvements. Below is the recommended team composition:
· Workload Architect who has complete view and understanding of the workload and overall big-picture of how the workload is being used, developed and deployed
· Project/Program manager, from the account team will be good to track the improvements recommended and for alliance with other teams
· Certified WA Reviewer who has experience in conducting the reviews and providing recommendations for improvements
· AWS Partner Solution Architect, if available, to further guide on remediations
· Most often the teams developing the workloads would not have a complete access to the information like Security, Cloud Financial Management etc. Its best to use templatized approach in this case if multiple reviews are planned for the same customer, with a one-time effort to collect information on current implementation
Sample Report
· Once the review is completed, the report is generated using the WA Tool
· AWS Well-Architected tool generates the report based on the answers checked and unchecked
· The issues/gaps are categorized as HRIs and MRIs by the tool based on several parameters and stock recommendations are provided by the tool itself
· HRI – High Risk Issues – are the ones that needs greater focus to close the gaps
· MRI – Medium Risk Issues – can be the second priority items
Sample Report Snapshot of HRIs/MRIs
Recommendations and the next steps
· Perform thorough analysis and come out with remediations for each HRI and MRI
· The improvements auto-suggested by the tools needs to be more carefully analysed specific to the workload being reviewed
· High-level recommendations can include overall approach which can be then developed as a PoC, or recommend a tool (home-grown or third-party)
· Low-level recommendations can include a project specific remediation including identifying a framework to use or a training plan for development team
· The Well-Architected Labs: https://www.wellarchitectedlabs.com/, covers most of the remediation techniques across all the 6 pillars. This hands-on labs helps gain the architectural expertise on AWS.
· https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/this-is-my-architecture/ can also be useful to learn architectural best practices.
Make improvements and measure the progress
· WA tool has the features to baseline the report
· After the remediations suggested are implemented, the workload has to be reviewed again
· The tool supports allows to save the milestones and track the HRIs and MRIs in each milestone and thus track how the HRIs and MRIs are resolved over period of time
Nurturing the Review team in your organization
It’s very important to create a culture of Well-Architected Reviews in any growing organization and hence this team has to be well nurtured:
· Identify the AWS Solutions Architect - PROFESSIONAL certified architects in your organization
· In case you have none, have an incentive program that can inspire the architects to get certified as this is mandatory requirement for Well-Architected Workshop/bootcamp by AWS
· Attend the workshop and bootcamp on WA Review to get hands-on training
· Have an elite group within the org with primary focus to do WA Reviews, with a lead architect owning the responsibility
· Let the newly trained reviewers be a part of the review team so that they can observe on how the reviews and recommendations are provided
Benefits of WA Tool and Reviews
· Get architectural guidance: WA tool is built based on the wisdom gathered by best architectural best practices analysing from thousands of workloads over many years. This knowledge is available at no cost to improve the design and to operate the workloads that are performant, reliable, cost effective, secure and in a sustainable way
· Enable consistent governance: Applying a consistent process to review and measure the quality of workloads helps to create and nurture a culture and art of reviewing.
· Continuously improve architectures: WA tool supports features to generate report and track the HRIs/MRIs and also save milestones. The improvements can be tracked over a period of time.
Conclusion
The Well-Architected Review is a discovery activity that helps to identify the gaps in any given workload. It also recommends remediation of the gaps identified. Remediations are actionable and can be executed as PoCs.
IBM is a validated AWS Well-Architected Program Partner and has created a rich culture of pro-active Well-Architected reviewing using the WA tool for our customers. IBM has a dedicated AWS practice that proactively discusses with customer account teams on best practices, innovations, WA reviews etc. Our IBM customers have benefited from Well-Architected Reviews. IBM ensured delivery quality with this Well-Architected Reviews.
You can find more details on IBM expertise and competencies here.