Improve Your Architecture With The AWS Well-Architected Framework: FAQs Answered

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Table of contents

• Key Concepts

• How can you benefit from an AWS Well-Architected Review

• When to perform an AWS Well-Architected Review

• Commonly asked questions about the AWS Well-Architected Framework Review

• The NaNLABS Way: Conducting an efficient architectural review 

Key concepts

Before we jump in, let’s refresh some concepts. If you’re already familiar with an AWS Well-Architected Review and its pillars, jump to the next section to explore its benefits: 

What is an AWS Well-Architected Review?

An AWS Well-Architected Review is a process that enables cloud architects to build more performant, secure, resilient, and efficient infrastructures for platforms and workloads. It makes use of a questionnaire called the Well-Architected Framework. This allows businesses to dig deep into their infrastructure and determine how aligned with AWS best practices their architecture is.

These reviews follow the framework guidelines for consistency and a blame-free approach, allowing teams to dive deep to find critical issues and propose solutions.

What are the six pillars of an AWS Well-Architected Framework?

The AWS Well-Architected Framework goes by six main pillars, these include: 

1. Security: Using risk assessments and mitigation strategies to protect information, assets, and systems while still delivering business value.

2. Reliability: Being able to recover from any infrastructure or service disruption and scaling resources to meet the changing demand over time.

3. Performance efficiency: Supporting the efficient use of computing resources to meet the demand and system requirements as these fluctuate. 

4. Cost optimization: Avoiding and reducing unnecessary expenses or underperforming resources, and using the savings to improve other areas of your business.

5. Operational excellence: Following best operational practices and implementing processes to handle production workloads. 

6. Sustainability: Measuring and understanding the impact your system and operations have on the environment and applying best practices to reduce it. 

How can you benefit from an AWS Well-Architected Review

When building cloud-based products, you usually need to sacrifice something. This could be security, by giving developers and system administrators easy access to cloud resources, or resilience, by not having a proper backing up process.

That’s when an AWS Well-Architected Review can help. By reviewing your software infrastructure with this framework, you can: 

• Enhance system security and compliance

• Optimize operational efficiency and cost savings

• Improve reliability and performance scalability

• Become more sustainable over time 

When to perform an AWS Well-Architected Review

It’s recommended to do so every six to twelve months. However, you could benefit from doing it in multiple scenarios, including: 

• After you’ve designed the architecture for your platform and want to start building it

• Before any planned launch, big events, or product improvement

• When you’re well advanced in the construction or approaching release and want to be prepared

• You have a service already in production which could be improved

Using the AWS Well-Architected Framework at any of these stages allows you to: “Avoid one-way doors that are difficult to change,” as disclosed in the framework documents. Although many architectural decisions can be reversible (two-way doors), “One-way doors are hard or impossible to reverse and require more inspection before making them,” states the documentation. 

Reviewing your architecture early on enables you to build resilient, performant, secure, and scalable infrastructures. 

Commonly asked questions about the AWS Well-Architected Review

Diving into your first AWS Well-Architected Review? You don’t have to do it alone. As your technical sidekick, we’ll walk you through this process. We’ve compiled a list of burning questions you may have. Let’s explore the answers together. 

1. Who should participate in an AWS Well-Architected Review?

Cloud architects, security specialists, engineers, product managers, operation teams, developers, and business/financial stakeholders are usually invited to participate in this review. 

2. How do I prepare for an AWS Well-Architected Review?

You can prepare for an AWS Well-Architected Review by compiling information about your current architecture and setting clear objectives: What are you looking to solve with a Well-Architected Review?

Make sure you have a deep understanding of your security measures and workloads, document the existing resources and cloud configurations, and invite the right stakeholders. You should also look into your current reliability processes and bring this information to the session.

3. How much time will it take to complete the AWS Well-Architected assessment?

AWS documentation states that the discovery phase usually lasts between four and eight hours. However, we’ve seen that this depends on each team, their availability, and how many workloads they’re assessing. That said, the process may end up taking days or even weeks. 

4. What if I don’t have the time to conduct an AWS Well-Architected Review?

This assessment can help you evaluate whether you’re prepared to push your application into production and which potential challenges you’ll face. Not making the time to conduct an AWS Well-Architected Review will leave you with blind spots in your infrastructure design. 

This may lead to unexpected operational problems, lack of reliability, poor performance, and increased costs, to name a few. As a consequence, this can lead to losing your users' trust and spending loads of money to amend those issues.

5. Do you need to host your product in the AWS cloud to conduct a Well-Architected Review?

Not necessarily. While the AWS Well-Architected Review was created to analyze AWS cloud architectures, you could use the Well-Architected Framework questions to conduct a self-assessment. 

6. Are there any technologies that are incompatible with AWS Well-Architected Review?

The framework tries to be technology agnostic. Here are examples of questions that you’ll find in these reviews:

• How do you plan your network topology? 

• How do you design interactions in a distributed system to prevent failures?

• How do you anticipate, respond to, and recover from incidents?

• How do you classify your data?

These are just examples, but as you can see, none of these mention any technology.

7. Do you need to have a certification to conduct a Well-Architected Review?

Just like you don’t need to host your product on the AWS cloud to conduct this review, you also don’t need to get certified to do a self-assessment. You can simply access the AWS Well-Architected Tool and go through the questions. However, if you want to conduct Well-Architected Reviews and offer it as a service you’ll need to get certified by AWS. 

If you’re looking for AWS consulting firms to assess your architecture, you can select one from the AWS Partner Network. Look for experts and businesses that are in the AWS Well-Architected Partner Program.

8. Do I need to address all AWS Well-Architected Review findings?

No, you don’t need to address all the findings. Think of any IT consultancy, you’ll explore critical issues and get a list of recommendations. But, it’s always up to you to decide. 

The AWS Well-Architected Review will show you areas of improvement in your cloud architecture and next steps including a severity range for you to make decisions. However, you can disregard those action points or postpone suggestions. 

9. What are alternatives to an AWS Well-Architected Review?

Alternatives to an AWS Well-Architected Review include:

• ISO certifications to prove that your internal processes are efficient. 

• Azure Well-Architected Framework to analyze pillars such as cost optimization, operational excellence, performance efficiency, reliability, and security following Azure’s best practices.

• Architecture reviews by consulting companies, such as NaNLABS, to catch critical issues with your architecture design, design one from scratch, or re-design an existing architecture.

Choosing one option depends on your goals. What are you looking to prove by conducting an architecture review? Answering this question will give you the answer.

10. What are common cloud issues that I can find in an AWS Well-Architected Review?

The most common cloud issues you can find with the AWS Well-Architected Framework refer to its main pillars. Hence, these include operational, security, reliability, performance, cost-efficiency, or sustainability problems. 

Here are specific business issues we tend to find in architectural reviews: 

• Inefficient processes that slow operations. Mostly due to the lack of Standard Operational Procedure (SOP) documentation, and a culture around it. Each employee completes actions differently, causing bottlenecks and operational inefficiencies. 

• Blind spots around backups. These include:

  • Not exercising their backup strategy to guarantee that it works nor writing an SOP for it.

  • Not tracking Recovery Point Objective (RPO) to quantify the amount of lost information in case of an outage. 

  • Not measuring Recovery Time Objective (RTO) to determine what would be the amount of time it would take to recover in the worst-case scenario.

• Limited information about quotas. Mostly regarding quotas for the used services which directly impacts reliability. AWS Services tends to be very discreet about the quotas you’ll find and how much you can increment them. This presents an issue because understanding how services play together, and which quotas could have an impact on the architecture is critical.

The NaNLABS way: Conducting an efficient architectural review 

At NaNLABS, we’ve come up with a unique approach to analyzing software architectures. It’s different from an AWS Well-Architected Framework although it borrows some of its pillars. 

A key difference is that our review is not necessarily scripted, it’s not a Q&A. Instead, we gather information about your context and tailor a response based on your needs and goals. 

Another big difference is that in our architecture review, we can do re-architectures. This means using diverse services to accomplish the same goals, which is beyond the scope of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

When to choose the NaNLABS architecture review over an AWS Well-Architected Review?

Choose the NaNLABS architecture review over the AWS WAR whenever: 

• You need to answer a specific question about your architecture. 

• You want a more tailored response based on specific needs.

• You’re considering re-architectures using different services.

We’re AWS experts, offer AWS Serverless development, and are AWS-certified partners. We’ve also been offering solutions to businesses like yours for over 11 years. 

With a proven track record of over 11 years, we’ve helped startups, mid-sized businesses, and enterprise-level companies harness the power of AWS. As AWS-certified partners, we craft custom solutions leveraging AWS to drive efficiency and growth.

“NaNLABS collaborated with us to streamline our cloud infrastructure and deployment processes. We were impressed with the quality of both their management and individual programming capabilities,” shared Ben Coleman, Founder at Amalgam.

Want to get a glimpse of what the NaNLABS review looks like? We’re offering limited slots for you to meet with our experts in a snippet version of our full architecture review.

Check out if a data engineering consultancy is what you need right now.