Cloud computing is proliferating each passing year. While the cloud market has matured over the years, it’s high-demand and surging adoption denotes that there are plenty of disruptive opportunities. An Infoworld research cites that 2017 is the year when the cloud will zoom like a rocket. With 2016 soon to wrap up, this calls for building an architecture that would lead to considerable benefits.

Amazon, with the promise of complete ‘Freedom,’ scalability, agility, and responsibility, now has revised and published its AWS Well-Architected Framework — an insightful guide to AWS Architecture Solutions with design principles for systems running on AWS.

Till date, the AWS Well-Architected Framework was based upon 4 key broad pillars, namely security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. Now, there is one more addition to this pillars’ list. It is the Operational Excellence. Here’s a quick walk through of all the five pillars.

1. Security

Security matters the most on cloud. And, the infra design should serve complete data protection, privilege management of all AWS accounts, infrastructure protection, and identify any security breach with Detective Controls.

To strengthen security of a system and protect it from critical threats and vulnerabilities, AWS suggests the following design principles:

Apply security at all levels

Enable traceability

Implement a principle of least privilege

Secure the system at the application, data, and OS level

Automate security best practices

2. Reliability

A well-architected system is one that has a well-planned foundation and monitoring in place, with mechanisms for handling changes in demand or requirements. The system should be designed to detect failure and automatically heal itself.

The well-architected framework suggests following design principles:

Test recovery procedures

Automatically recover from failure

Use horizontal scalability to increase system availability

Automatically add/remove resources as needed to avoid capacity saturation

Manage change in automation

3. Performance Efficiency

The Performance Efficiency pillar, as cited in the whitepaper, focuses on efficient use of computing resources to meet requirements as well as maintain that efficiency as the demand changes and technologies evolve.

The design principles recommended are:

Democratize advanced technologies

Deploy your system globally at minimal cost for lower latency

Use serverless architectures to avoid operational burden

Try various comparative testing and configurations to find out what performs better

4. Cost Optimization

The Cost Optimization pillar is about optimizing costs, eliminating, unused or sub-optimal resources. Cost optimization should consider matching supply with demand, using cost-effective resources, being aware of the expenditure, and optimizing the costs over time.

This can be achieved by the following principles:

Adopt a consumption model

Benefit from economies of scale

Stop spending money on data center operations

Analyze and attribute expenditure

Use managed services to reduce cost of ownership

5. Operational Excellence

Operational excellence of a product workload is generally gauged by its agility, reliability, and performance. The best way forward is to standardized and manage these workloads on a routine basis using automation. AWS, under its new Operational Excellence pillar, suggests six principles, which will help drive the operational excellence:

Perform operations with code

Align operations processes to business objectives

Make regular, small, incremental changes

Test for responses to unexpected events

Learn from operational events and failures

Keep operations procedures current

As AWS users leverage the Well-Architected AWS Framework to align with architecture best practices, they need assistance to ensure compliance with the best practices as per the above mentioned Five Pillars.

Botmetric is already helping customers proactively comply and adhere with these Five Pillars! It not only helps with top-notch cost optimization measures, automates security best practices, and ensures performance efficiency with comprehensive compute resource optimization, but also helps customers with various operational efficiency activities, even before AWS release this new pillar in its updated whitepaper.

Right from managing to optimizing EBS Volume Snapshots, IAM Role, VPC/vCPUs, security groups, S3, EC2 instances, RIs, RDS, DynamoDB, etc., Botmetric helps manage and optimize AWS cloud intelligently.

We are coming up with many other features in the platform that will support the new Operational Efficiency pillar. So stay tuned with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn to get all the updates of Botmetric can help you manage AWS cloud better, simpler, and faster.

Do try Botmetric for free. If you have any queries, give us a shout out at support@botmetric.com.