Well Architected Framework: An Overview

Architectural best practices

The well-architected framework helps you understand the pros and cons of the decisions you make while building systems on AWS or Azure. As with most of this course, we will be using AWS as the service provider.

By using the framework you will learn architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud. It provides a way for you to consistently measure your architectures against best practices and identify areas for improvement. We believe that having well-architected systems greatly increases the likelihood of business success.

As Solutions Architects my team and I have years of experience architecting solutions across a wide variety of business verticals and use cases. We have helped design and architect 70+ customers’ architectures on AWS, Azure, and a few on Oracle. From this experience, we have identified the best practices and core strategies for architecting systems in the cloud.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework documents a set of foundational questions that allow you to understand if a specific architecture aligns well with cloud best practices.

The framework provides a consistent approach to evaluating systems against the qualities you expect from modern cloud-based systems and the remediation that would be required to achieve those qualities.

As AWS continues to evolve, and we continue to learn more from working with our customers, we will continue to refine the definition of well-architected. This section of the course is intended for those in technology roles, such as chief technology officers (CTOs), architects, developers, TPMs, SDMs, and operations team members.

Consistent set of best practices

Every day we assist customers in architecting systems to take advantage of best practices in the cloud. We work with you on making architectural trade-offs as your designs evolve. As you deploy these systems into live environments, we learn how well these systems perform and the consequences of those trade-offs.

The Well-Architected Framework provides a consistent set of best practices for customers and partners to evaluate architectures and provides a set of questions you can use to evaluate how well architecture is aligned to AWS best practices. The Well-Architected Framework is based on five pillars operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.