The AWS Well-Architected Framework – Introduction to Serverless on AWS
The AWS Well-Architected Framework
The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a collection of architectural best practices for designing, building, and operating secure, scalable, highly available, resilient, and cost-effective applications in the cloud. It consists of six pillars covering fundamental areas of a modern cloud system:
The Operational Excellence pillar provides design principles and best practices to devise organizational objectives to identify, prepare, operate, observe, and improve operating workloads in the cloud. Failure anticipation and mitigation plans, evolving applications in small but frequent increments, and continuous evaluation and improvements of the operational procedures are some of the core principles of this pillar.
The Security pillar focuses on identity and access management, protecting appli‐ cations at all layers, ensuring data privacy and control as well as traceability and auditing of all actions, and preparing for and responding to security events. It instills security thinking at all stages of development and is the responsibility of everyone involved.
An application deployed and operated in the cloud should be able to scale and function consistently as demand changes. The principles and practices of the
Reliability pillar include designing applications to work with service quotas and limits, preventing and mitigating failures, and identifying and recovering from failures, among other guidance.
The Performance Efficiency pillar is about the approach of selecting and the use of the right technology and resources to build and operate an efficient system. Monitoring and data metrics play an important role here in constantly reviewing and making trade-offs to maintain efficiency at all times.
The Cost Optimization pillar guides organizations to operate business applica‐ tions in the cloud in a way that delivers value and keeps costs low. The best practices focus on financial management, creating cloud cost awareness, using cost-effective resources and technologies such as serverless, and continuously analyzing and optimizing based on business demand.
The Sustainability pillar is the latest addition to the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It focuses on contributing to a sustainable environment by reducing energy consumption; architecting and operating applications that reduce the use of compute power, storage space, and network round trips; use of on-demand resources such as serverless services; and optimizing to the required level and not over.