Paulo Lapa

This post fits between domains two and three of the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner crash course. However, I feel the AWS Well-Architected Framework needs its own blog post since it is a rather over-arching concept of good cloud and software architecture practices.

How this course is structured

Each heading of this post refers to a learning objective of the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam guide. It might not be the easiest way to read, but I felt it was the most certain to cover everything that is needed.

The Well-Architected Framework (WAF) is a set of best practices that enable building high-performance, secure, resilient, and efficient applications and workloads. It is built around six pillars:

• operational excellence
• security
• reliability
• performance efficiency
• cost optimization
• sustainability

Let’s explore each domain of the AWS Well-Architected Framework:

Operational excellence design principles:

1. Perform operations as code
2. Make frequent, small, reversible changes
3. Refine operations procedures frequently
4. Anticipate failure
5. Learn from all operational failures

Security design principles

1. Implement a strong identity foundation
2. Enable traceability
3. Apply security at all layers
4. Automate best practices
5. Protect data in transit and at rest
6. Keep people away from data
7. Prepare for security events

Reliability design principles

1. Automatically recover from failure
2. Test recovery procedures
3. Save horizontally to increase aggregate workload availability
4. Stop guessing capacity
5. Manage change in automation

Performance design principles

1. Democatrize advanced technologies
2. Go global in minutes
3. Use serverless architectures
4. Experiment more often
5. Consider mechanical sympathy

Cost optimization design principles

1. Implement cloud financial management
2. Adopt a consumption model
3. Measure overall efficiency
4. Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting
5. Analyze and attribute expenditure

Sustainability design principles (not part of the exam)

1. Understand your impact
2. Establish sustainability goals
3. Maximize utilization
4. Anticipate and adopt new, more efficient hardware and software offerings
5. Use managed services
6. Reduce the downstream impact of your cloud workloads

Related posts:

Domain 2: Security and Compliance AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Crash Course