AWS Well-Architected framework
Is your system well-architected?
Welcome back to AWS Comsum Quarterly.
Due to the changes at twitter our previous newsletter platform, Revue is no longer available; so here we are in our cosy new new home on Substack.
Ahead of the first issue of 2023 we’ve ported the last issue of 2022 - Sarah Hamilton’s look at The aws Well-Architected Framework.
So enough blather from us… over to Sarah
Is your system well-architected?
The AWS Well-Architected framework provides us with a template for building ‘good’ systems. If you’ve mastered each of the pillars then your platform is probably running pretty smoothly — handling spikes in traffic, great developer experience, awesome SEO, low running costs and much much more.
However, most platforms and engineers are on a journey, and the well-architected framework provides us with a structure to be better than we are today. Perhaps your engineers can merge to production quickly, but your system experiences downtime, or the website is quick but incurs large monthly costs. The framework is there to guide us on our journey to build better platforms.
The AWS whitepaper is lengthy but well worth a read. But if you prefer more bite-size pieces of information, I’ll be walking us through some of my favourite blog posts which have inspired me on my journey.
Operational Excellence
This pillar incorporates many ideas, but the overall concept is to deliver business value by having slick operations, observability and having a culture of learning from failures.
An area I like to focus attention on is our CI/CD operations. Rawad Haber offers some great opinions on how to level up your pipelines using GitHub Actions.
Serverless CI/CD: 5 specific ways to level up your pipelines
An awesome library that revolutionizes the testing of Serverless Architectures is sls-test-tools. It focuses on integration testing Serverless Architectures which is crucial to add to your CI/CD pipelines for a health check of your architecture. Check out Joel Hamilton’s take on using sls-test-tools for testing Step Functions.
Integration Testing Step Functions: Using sls-test-tools
Security
This is an element that is well worth spending the time to wrap your head around — and an area that I am actively trying to improve my understanding of. With attackers often being one step ahead, we must protect our platforms.
Luckily AWS provides us with the tools to protect our systems. But we need to meet them halfway by understanding and implementing the tools they offer. Episode #131 of Serverless Chats Podcast features Merritt Baer and Megan O’Neil talking about all things AWS Security.
Episode #131: Security in the Cloud with Merritt Baer and Megan O'Neil
Reliability
No one wants unintentional downtime — ever. The reliability pillar provides a structure for avoiding this.
Event-Driven architecture is deemed a gold standard for ensuring fault tolerance across distributed and decoupled systems. The awesome James Beswick describes how we can improve our development processes with Event-Driven architectures.
Performance
The performance pillar is all about utilising compute resources efficiently as demand changes and providing a performant user experience. Ashan provides some great tips for improving user experience by tweaking your Lambda memory, using CloudFront and more…
5 Tips to SpeedUp Serverless Web Apps in AWS
Cost Optimization
For cost optimisation, I’m always going to advocate for all things Serverless. With the service’s pay-per-use model, while scaling effortlessly with demand, it’s a no-brainer. If your backend is already Serverless then your TCO should really be quite low. However, if you want to optimise your Lambda costs, check out Yan Cui’s guide to saving money on AWS Lambda.
The best ways to save money on Lambda
And here is a cost horror story I rather enjoyed from Chris Short…
The AWS bill heard around the world
Sustainability — the new kid on the block
The sustainability pillar focuses on our systems' impact on the environment. From the effects of data centres, down to the result of charging your laptop, drawing an exact figure for the impacts of computing on global warming is complex. However, with figures reporting around 4% of the world’s emissions, it’s safe to say that the impact is significant and worth a thought — especially, since this is due to rise remarkably over the coming years.
Sustainability comes under the shared responsibility model where AWS is responsible for the sustainability of the cloud and the customer is responsible for their actions within the cloud. Sheen Brisals has written a series of blog posts about sustainability in Serverless computing. Notably, he describes the importance of the sustainability of the cloud.
Why Sustainability OF The Cloud Is Important To Serverless
And thats a wrap on our new Substack hosted AWSGQ. Another huge thanks to the fantastic Sarah Hamilton for putting this edition together.
Before we go; what are you doing on 28th Sept?
Early bird tickets are on sale for the next AWS Comsum. We’ve ramped things and added another hall so expect even more fascinating talks from the AWS Community.
Secure your spot now!
That’s all folks! We’ll be back with another Guest editor in the coming weeks.
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