After an organization decides to move to the AWS Cloud and to start taking advantage of the benefits that it offers, one of the next steps is to figure out how to properly architect their applications. Having talked to many of them, I know that they are looking for best practices and prescriptive design patterns, along with some ready-made solutions and some higher-level strategic guidance.

To this end, I am pleased to share the new AWS Answers page with you:

Designed to provide you with clear answers to your common questions about architecting, building, and running applications on AWS, the page includes categorized guidance on account, configuration & infrastructure management, logging, migration, mobile apps, networking, security, and web applications. The information originates from well-seasoned AWS architects and is presented in Q&A format. Every contributor to the answers presented on this page has spent time working directly with our customers and their answers reflect the hands-on experience that they have accumulated in the process.

Each answer offers prescriptive guidance in the form of a high-level brief or a fully automated solution that you can deploy using AWS CloudFormation, along with a supporting Implementation Guide that you can view online or download in PDF form. Here are a few to whet your appetite:

How can I Deploy Preconfigured Protections Using AWS WAF? – The solution will set up preconfigured AWS WAF rules and custom components, including a honeypot, in the configuration illustrated on the right.

How do I Automatically Start and stop my Amazon EC2 Instances? – The solution will set up the EC2 Scheduler in order to stop EC2 instances that are not in use, and start them again when they are needed.

What Should I Include in an Amazon Machine Image? This brief provides best practices for creating images and introduces three common AMI designs.

How do I Implement VPN Monitoring on AWS? – The solution will deploy a VPN Monitor and automatically record historical data as a custom CloudWatch metric.

How do I Share a Single VPN Connection with Multiple VPCs? This brief helps you minimize the number of remote connections between multiple Amazon VPC networks and your on-premises infrastructure.

— Jeff;