Architecture Flashcards
AWS Well-Architected Framework
The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand how to design and operate reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the AWS Cloud. It provides a way for you to consistently measure your architecture against best practices and design principles and identify areas for improvement.
The Well-Architected Framework is based on six pillars:
- Operational excellence
- Security
- Reliability
- Performance efficiency
- Cost optimization
- Sustainability
Operational excellence
Operational excellence is the ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures.
Design principles for operational excellence in the cloud include performing operations as code, annotating documentation, anticipating failure, and frequently making small, reversible changes.
Security
The Security pillar is the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies.
When considering the security of your architecture, apply these best practices:
- Automate security best practices when possible.
- Apply security at all layers.
- Protect data in transit and at rest.
Reliability
Reliability is the ability of a system to do the following:
- Recover from infrastructure or service disruptions
- Dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand
- Mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues
Reliability includes testing recovery procedures, scaling horizontally to increase aggregate system availability, and automatically recovering from failure.
Performance Efficiency
Performance efficiency is the ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
Evaluating the performance efficiency of your architecture includes experimenting more often, using serverless architectures, and designing systems to be able to go global in minutes.
Cost Optimisation
Cost optimization is the ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point.
Cost optimization includes adopting a consumption model, analyzing and attributing expenditure, and using managed services to reduce the cost of ownership.
Sustainability
Sustainability is the ability to continually improve sustainability impacts by reducing energy consumption and increasing efficiency across all components of a workload by maximizing the benefits from the provisioned resources and minimizing the total resources required.
To facilitate good design for sustainability:
- Understand your impact
- Establish sustainability goals
- Maximize utilization
- Anticipate and adopt new, more efficient hardware and software offerings
- Use managed services
- Reduce the downstream impact of your cloud workloads
Advantages of Cloud Computing
Operating in the AWS Cloud offers many benefits over computing in on-premises or hybrid environments.
In this section, you will learn about six advantages of cloud computing:
- Trade upfront expense for variable expense.
- Benefit from massive economies of scale.
- Stop guessing capacity.
- Increase speed and agility.
- Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers.
- Go global in minutes.
Trade upfront expense for variable expense
Upfront expenses include data centers, physical servers, and other resources that you would need to invest in before using computing resources.
Instead of investing heavily in data centers and servers before you know how you’re going to use them, you can pay only when you consume computing resources.
Benefit from massive economies of scale
By using cloud computing, you can achieve a lower variable cost than you can get on your own.
Because usage from hundreds of thousands of customers aggregates in the cloud, providers such as AWS can achieve higher economies of scale. Economies of scale translate into lower pay-as-you-go prices.
Stop guessing capacity
With cloud computing, you don’t have to predict how much infrastructure capacity you will need before deploying an application.
Increase Speed and Agility
The flexibility of cloud computing makes it easier for you to develop and deploy applications.
This flexibility also provides your development teams with more time to experiment and innovate.
Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers
Cloud computing in data centers often requires you to spend more money and time managing infrastructure and servers.
A benefit of cloud computing is the ability to focus less on these tasks and more on your applications and customers.
