The 5 Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework depicted as a set of stone columns

The Five Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework

AWS have constructed five Pillars that should be incorporated into application architecture to create help produce stable and efficient systems. Find out what these Pillars are, and why they are important.

What is the purpose of the five pillars?

AWS created the five pillars to set a foundation for your approach to construction of architecture and systems within AWS. AWS state that neglecting the five pillars can make building a system that delivers on your expectations and requirements challenging¹.

Operational Excellence
Security
Reliability
Performance Efficiency
Cost Optimisation

The Five Pillars

Operational Excellence.

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The Operational Excellence Pillar outlines the ability to run workloads effectively, gain insight into an operation, and continuously improve supporting development, processes and procedures to deliver business value.

Design Principles

Perform operations as code
Make frequent, small, reversible changes
Refine operations procedures frequently
Anticipate failure
Learn from all operational failures

Best Practices

Operations team are to support business outcomes by having an understanding of their business and customer needs. Operations creates and uses procedures to respond to operational events and validates their effectiveness against business needs as well as collecting metrics that are used to measure the achievement of business outcomes.

Operations are responsible for supporting the evolution of both business and customer needs as time goes on, incorporating lessons learned along the way.

Security.

Read the Whitepaper

The Security Pillar outlines the ability to use cloud technologies to improve and protect the security of your data, systems, and assets.

Design Principles

Implement a strong identity foundation
Enable traceability
Apply security at all layers
Automate security best practices
Protect data in transit and at rest
Keep people away from data
Prepare for security events

Best Practices

Least privilege access should be implemented across systems to control who can do what. Processes should also be in place to identify security incidents and protect systems and services to maintain the confidentiality and integrity of data through data protection.

Alongside the well-defined processes security responses should be practised to best prepare for a security incidents and comply with regulatory obligations.

The AWS Shared Responsibility Model enables organisations to achieve their security and compliance goals by sharing the responsibility of security. With AWS taking care of the security of the physical infrastructure that supports the cloud technologies, AWS customers can focus on using services to accomplish their goals.

Reliability.

Read the Whitepaper

The Reliability Pillar outlines the ability for workloads to perform consistently as intended, when exacted to. Workloads should be operable and testable through their total lifecycle.

Design Principles

Automatically recover from failure
Test recovery procedures
Scale horizontally to increase aggregate workload availability
Stop guessing capacity
Manage change in automation

Best Practices

The primary practise of the Reliability Pillar is to architect systems that are designed to prevent and mitigate failures. The workload must handle demand and requirement changes, detect failure and heal automatically.

With AWS, most of the requirements are already incorporated or may be addressed as needed. It’s the responsibility of AWS to satisfy the requirement of sufficient networking and compute capacity, and the responsibility of the AWS customer to manage the resource size and allocation.

Performance Efficiency.

Read the Whitepaper

The Performance Efficiency Pillar outlines the ability to use computing resources effectively to meet system and application requirements; to maintain efficiency as demand and technologies change.

Design Principles

Democratize advanced technologies
Go global in minutes
Use serverless architectures
Experiment more often
Consider mechanical sympathy

Best Practices

Gathering data on all aspects of the architecture, from the high-level design to the selection and configuration of resource types will aid in achieving Performance Efficiency.

As well as data gathering, regular reviews should be scheduled in order to ensure AWS customers are taking advantage of the evolving AWS Cloud.

Make use of as many solutions as possible and combine multiple approaches to improve performance.

Cost Optimisation.

Read the Whitepaper

The Cost Optimisation Pillar outlines the ability to systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point.

Design Principles

Implement cloud financial management
Adopt a consumption model
Measure overall efficiency
Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting
Analyse and attribute expenditure

Best Practices

Architecture decisions can easily be devised by haste rather than data, and as a result deployments are often overcompensated as opposed to cost-optimal. This can lead to over-provisioned and under-optimised deployments. Spending time to benchmark for the most cost-optimal deployment is always advised to avoid this.

Summary

Operational Excellence

Security

Reliability

Performance Efficiency

Cost Optimisation

You can read more on the best practises for each of the 5 pillars at The AWS Well-Architected Framework.

The Five Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework

What is the purpose of the five pillars?

The Five Pillars

Operational Excellence.

Design Principles

Best Practices

Security.

Design Principles

Best Practices

Reliability.

Design Principles

Best Practices

Performance Efficiency.

Design Principles

Best Practices

Cost Optimisation.

Design Principles

Best Practices

Summary

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