AWS Architecting and Ecosystem

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 based on changing requirements
• 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 Architectural Framework 6 Pillars

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

They are not something to balance, or trade-offs, they're a synergy.

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
• 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
• Use managed services - to reduce operational burden
• Implement observability for actionable insights - performance, reliability, cost....

Prepare

• AWS Cloudformation
• AWS Config

Operate

• AWS Cloudformation
• AWS Config
• AWS CloudTrail
• Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS X-Ray

Evolve

• AWS Cloudformation
• AWS CodeBuild
• AWS CodeCommit
• AWS CodeDeploy
• AWS CodePipeline

2. Security

• Includes the ability to protect information, systems and assets while delivcring business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies
• Design Principles:
• Implementing 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
• AWS Services
• Identity and Access Management
• IAM
• AWS-STS
• MFA Token
• AWS Organizations
• Detective Controls
• AWS Config
• AWS CloudTrail
• Amazon CloudWatch
• Infrastructure Protection
• Amazon CloudFront
• Amazon VPC
• AWS Shield
• AWS WAF
• Amazon Inspector
• Data Protection
• KMS
• S3
• Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
• Amazon EBS
• Amazon RDS
• Incident Response
• IAM
• AWS CloudFormation
• Amazon CloudWatch Events

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 aggragate system availability - Distribute requests across multiple, smaller resources to ensure that they don't share a common point of failure
• Stop guessing capacity - Maintian 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
• AWS Services
• Foundations
• IAM
• Amazon VPC
• Service limits/Service Quotas
• AWS Trusted Advisor
• Change Management
• AWS Auto Scaling
• Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS CloudTrail
• AWS Config
• Failure Management
• Backups
• AWS CloudFormation
• Amazon S3
• Amazon S3 Glacier
• Amazon Route 53

4. Performance Efficiency

• Includes the ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requierments 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 regoins
• 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
• AWS services
• Selection
• AWS Auto Scaling
• AWS Lambda
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
• Amazon RDS
• Review
• AWS CloudFormation 
• AWS News Blog
• Monitoring
• Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS Lambda
• Tradeoffs
• Amazon RDS
• Amazon ElastiCache
• AWS Snowball
• Amazon CloudFront

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
• AWS services
• Expenditure Awareness
• AWS Budgets
• AWS Cost and Usage Report
• AWS Cost Explorer
• Reserved Instance Reporting
• Cost-Effective Resources
• Spot Instance
• Reserved Instance
• Amazon S3 Glacier
• Matching supply and demand
• AWS Auto Scaling
• AWS Lambda
• Optimizing Over Time
• AWS Trusted Advisor
• AWS Cost and Usage Report

6. Sustainability

• The sustainability pillar focuses on minimizing the environment impacts of running cloud workloads
• Design Principles
• Uderstand your impact - establish performance indicators, evaluate imporvements
• 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 cloud 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 services
• EC2 Auto Scaling, Serverless Offering (Lambda, Fargate)
• Cost Explorer - AWS Graviton 2, EC2 T instances, Spot Instances
• EFS-IA, Amazon S3 Glacier, EBS Cold HDD volumes
• S3 Lifecycle Configurations, S3 Intelligent Tiering
• Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager
• Read Local, Write Global: RDS Read Replicas, Aurora Global DB, DynamoDB Global Table, CloudFront

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 Customer Carbon Footprint Tool

• Track, measure, review and forecast the Carbon emissions generated from your AWS usage
• Helps you meet your own sustainability goals
• It is present in Billing portal

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF)

• Helps you build and then execute a comprehensive plan for your digital transformation through innovative use of AWS
• Created by AWS professionals by taking advantage of AWS Best Practices and lessons learned from 1000s of customers
• AWS CAF identifies specific organizational capabilities that underpin successful cloud transformations
• AWS CAF groups its capabilities in six perspectives:
• Business 
• People
• Governance
• Platform
• Security
• Operations

CAF Perspectives and Foundational Capabilities

Business Capabilities

• Business Perspective - helps ensure that your cloud investments accelerate your digital transformation ambitions and business outcomes
• People Perspective - serves as a bridge between technology and business, accelerating the cloud journey to help organizations more rapidly evolve to a culture of continous growth, learning and where change becomes business-as-normal, with focus on culture, organizational structure, leadership and workforce
• Governance Perspective - helps you orchestrate your cloud initiatives while maximizing organizational benefits and minimizing transformation-related risks.
• Business Capabilities 
• Strategy Management
• Portfolio Management
• Innovation Management
• Product Management
• Strategic Partnership
• Data Monitization
• Business Insight
• Data Science
• People
• Culture Evolution
• Transformational Leadership
• Cloud Fluency
• Workforce Transformation
• Change Acceleration
• Organization Design
• Organizational Alignment
• Governance
• Program and Project Management
• Benefits Management
• Risk Management
• Cloud Financial Management
• Application Portfolio Management
• Data Governance
• Data Curation

Techinical Capabilities

• Platform Perspective - helps you build an enterprise-grade, scalable, hybrid cloud platform, modernize existing workloads, and implement new cloud-native solutions
• Security Perspective - helps you achieve the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your data and cloud workloads
• Operations Perspective - helps ensure that your cloud services are delivered at a level that meets the needs of your business
• Platform
• Platform Architecture
• Data Architecture
• Platform Engineering
• Data Engineering
• Provisioning and Orchestration
• Modern Application Development
• Continous integration and Continous Delivery
• Security
• Security Governance
• Security Assurance
• Identity and Access Management
• Thread Detection
• Vulnerability Management
• Infrastructure Protection
• Data Protection
• Application Security
• Incident Response
• Operations
• Observability
• Event Mangement (AIOps)
• Incident and Problem Management
• Change and Release Management
• Performance and Capacity Management
• Configuration Management
• Patch Management
• Availability and Continuity Management
• Application Management

AWS CAF - Transformation Domains

• Technology - using the cloud to migrate and modernize legacy infrastructure, applications, data and analytics platforms....
• Process - digitizing, automating and optimizing your business operations
• leveraging new data and analytics platforms to create actionable insights
• using machine learning (ML) to improve your customer service experience...
• Organization - Reimagining your operating model
• Organizing your teams around products and value strams
• Leveraging agile methods to rapidly iterate and evolve
• Product - reimagining your business model by creating new value propositions (products & services) and revenue models 

AWS CAF - Transformation Phases

• Envision - demonstrate how the Cloud will accelerate business outcomes by identifying transformation opportunities and create a foundation for your digital transformation
• Align - identify capability gaps across the 6 AWS CAF Perspectives which results in an Action Plan
• Launch - build and deliver pilot initiatives in production and demonstrate incremental business value
• Scale - expand pilot initiatives to the desired scale while realizing the desired business benefits

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
• continously 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
• AWS Forums (community)
• AWS Whitepapers & Guides
• AWS Solutions Library (formerly Quick Starts)
• Vetted Technology Solutions for the AWS Cloud
• Example: live streaming on AWS

AWS Ecosystem - AWS Support

• Developer
• Business hours email access to Cloud Support Associates
• General guidance - < 24 business hours
• System impaired - < 12 business hours
• Business 
• 24*7 phone, email and chat access to Cloud Support Engineers
• Production system impaired < 4 hours
• Production system down < 1 hour
• Enterprise
• Access to a Technical Account Manager (TAM)
• Concierge Support Team (for billing and account best practices)
• Business-critical system down < 15 minutes

AWS Marketplace

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

AWS Training

• AWS Digital (online) and Classroom Training (in-person or virtual)
• AWS Private Training (for your organization)
• Training and Certification for the US Government
• Training and Certification for the Enterprise
• AWS Academy - helps universities teach AWS
• Online teacher

AWS Professional Services & Partner Network

• The AWS Professional Services organization is a global team of experts
• They work alongside your team and a chosen member of the APN
• APN - AWS Partner Network
• APN Technology Partners - providing hardware, connectivity, and software
• APN Consulting Partners - professional services firm to help build on AWS
• APN Training Partners - find who can help you learn AWS
• AWS Competency Program - AWS Competencies are granted to APN Partners who have demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success in specialized solution areas
• AWS Navigate Program - help Partners become better Partners

AWS IQ

• Quickly find professional help for your AWS projects
• Engage and pay AWS Certified 3rd party experts for on-demand project work
• Video-conferencing, contract management, secure collaboration, integrated billing
• For Customers
• Submit Request - describe your project
• Review Responses - Connect to experts (requirements & timelines)
• Select expert - Based on rates, experiences....
• Work Securely - Give experts appropriate access to your AWS account
• Pay per Milestone - Charges added into your AWS Bill
• For Experts
• Create Profile - Photo, bio, certs...
• Connect with Customers
• Start a Proposal - work description, price, milestones, ....
• Work Securely - Get appropriate access to customers AWS account
• Get Paid - Request payment after milestones are met

AWS re:Post

• AWS-managed Q&A service offering crowd-sourced, expert-reviewed answers to your technical questions about AWS that replaces the original AWS Forums
• Community members can earn reputation points to build up their community expert status by providing accepted answers and reviewing answers from other users
• Questions from AWS Premium Support customers that do not receive a response from the community are passed on to AWS Support engineers
• AWS re:Post is not intended to be used for quesitons that are time-sentivite or involve any proprietary information

AWS re:Post - Knowledge Center

• Contains the most frequent & common questions and requests

AWS Managed Services (AMS)

• Provides infrastructure and application support on AWS
• AMS offers a team of AWS experts who manage and operate your infrastructure for security, reliability and availability
• Helps organizations offload routine management tasks and focus on their business objectives
• Fully managed service, so AWS handles common activities such as change requests, monitoring, patch management, security and backup services
• Implements best practices and maintains your AWS infrastructure to reduce your operational overhead and risk
• AMS business hours are 24/365

Steps:

• AWS Managed Services
• Enable - Create a baseline governance and control model using inputs from people, process, and tool sets
• Sustain, Build or Migrate - Determine the fastest and most efficient way to integrate, develop and migrate your workloads
• Operate - Achieve operational outcomes at scale, anywhere, through observability, compliance and financial management
• Improve Security
• Focus on Automation
• Stronger Compliance
• Reduced Operating Costs
• Simplified Management
• Frictionless Innovation