Boost Reliability & Cut Costs with an AWS Well-Architected Review

The Envision phase focuses on demonstrating how the cloud will help accelerate your business outcomes. It does so by identifying and prioritizing transformation opportunities across each of the four transformation domains in line with your strategic business objectives. Associating your transformation initiatives with key stakeholders (senior individuals capable of influencing and driving change) and measurable business outcomes will help you demonstrate value as you progress through your transformation journey.

The Align phase focuses on identifying capability gaps across the key perspectives of business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations. In this phase, the goal is to identify cross-organizational dependencies, and surface stakeholder concerns and challenges. Doing so will help you create strategies for improving your cloud readiness, ensure stakeholder alignment, and facilitate relevant organizational change management activities.

The Launch phase focuses on delivering pilot initiatives in production and on demonstrating incremental business value. Pilots should be highly impactful and can help influence your future direction. Learning from pilots helps you to adjust your approach before scaling to full production.

The Scale phase focuses on expanding production pilots and business value to the desired scale and ensuring that the business benefits associated with your cloud investments are realized and sustained.

Organizations that have achieved a cloud-first mentality tend to shift their focus toward optimizing their cloud environments. They strive for optimal levels of operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability across their organizations. As organizations optimize their cloud environments, they might also seek to innovate, experiment, and reinvent their organizations and the value they offer customers using cloud technologies.

These are the highest priority workloads requiring the highest level of compliance stringency, security, and availability. Breaches or downtime could result in the halt of organization service, exposure of personally identifiable information (PII) or highly sensitive business data, severe legal or financial loss, loss of customer trust, reputational damage, and drastic loss in productivity. Some examples of business-critical workloads include enterprise applications, e-business applications, and client-specific lines of business applications.

These workloads support and impact one or more organizational or business objectives and were implemented because of organizational or business initiatives. Strategic external-facing workloads are designed to provide differentiated value and competitive advantage. They are customer facing and provide business value through the customers that use them. Breaches or downtime could have a damaging impact on the organization, potential legal liability, significant unplanned expenditure to recover, and a moderate disruption in functionality of services. Some examples of strategic workloads include online mobile banking applications and customer-facing learning management systems.

These workloads have a large scope and a role at the organizational level or across business-level functions. They support strategic internal functions that are important to organizational or key team functionality. Breaches or downtime could result in degraded organization or business functions, data exposure or loss would be difficult to recover from, a potential for financial impact, and lost productivity for affected job roles and users. Some examples of important applications include simulators, data monitoring applications, content management systems, and supply chain management applications.

These workloads support the internal functional needs of the organization or business and access internal data. Breaches or downtime could cause significant damage resulting in moderate financial loss, mild to serious disruptions in functionality and productivity for affected job roles and users, potentially negative publicity, and moderate unplanned expenditure to recover. Some examples of internal support workloads include employee attendance monitoring, warehouse applications, and customer relationship management (CRM) applications.

These workloads support access to public data and provide support to end-user functions. Breaches and downtime could result in minor impacts such as a minor financial loss, small effects on business function, and minimal effort or cost to recover. Some examples of general support workloads include job portals, social sites, and front-end support applications.

These workloads are used for experimentation or testing and do not contain production, sensitive, or PII data. Breaches or downtime only affects teams doing experimentation and testing. Downtime or data loss is acceptable and expected. There would be no or nominal legal, financial, or productivity impact, with recovery being a part of planned normal experimentation effort and cost. Some examples of experimentation or testing workloads include proof-of-concept, service or feature evaluation, and offline chaos engineering test systems.

Workloads are in the planning, requirements gathering, or design phases. No resources have been deployed in AWS yet. AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviews (WAFRs) will focus on evaluating the planned architecture and operations against AWS fundamental high-level best practices.

Workloads are in development, build, or implementation phases. They are built on resources that have been provisioned in AWS and might include non-production resources in on-premises or other cloud provider environments. WAFRs will focus on evaluating build, development, and implementation processes to determine if they align to AWS best practices.

Workloads are in testing for feature or overall production readiness. WAFRs are performed as part of testing for failures, resiliency, architectural patterns, and to identify potential sources of failure. The desired outcomes are to identify and mitigate or remove architectural or operational risks before production readiness evaluation begins.

Workloads are in pre-production being made ready for production deployments including full production launches or major feature releases. The focus in on operational readiness, launch procedures, and identifying architectural or operational risks.

The WAFR is being performed to identify and prioritize improvement opportunities in the operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability of the workload operations and architecture. For cloud-native workloads, this phase is common after the initial launch when the workload is in steady-state operation. For migrated workloads, this is a common lifecycle phase when developing a repurchasing, refactoring, or re-architecting strategy for a workload post-migration.

Evaluate what the organizational strategy, structure, culture, and priorities are, and how they will affect workloads in this profile.

Focus on improving the operational readiness of workloads. This includes evaluating key architectural and operational risks across all pillars for workloads in this profile.

Focus on improving operational efficiency by reducing operational overhead and improving time-to-market for features supported through operations activities.

Focus on improving incident response capabilities for operational incidents. The desired outcome is reducing mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolve (MTTR) for production-impacting incidents. This includes incidents that affect availability, and performance issues that impact workload stakeholders.

Focus on improving monitoring insights or the ability to understand systems state from emitted telemetry (observability) in support of meeting business objectives. This includes workload health, operational health, security, reliability, performance, costs, and sustainability.

Focus on improving the overall reliability, availability, or resilience of your workloads. This includes how systems are architected, tested, and able to respond to failures that impact availability.

Focus on improving overall security posture. This includes security of all layers of your architecture, operational procedures, detective controls, preventative controls, and compliance evaluation for security standards and requirements.

Focus on improving incident response capabilities for security incidents. The desired outcome is preventing, detecting, investigating, and mitigating security incidents as quickly as possible.

Focus on improving the overall performance efficiency of your workloads. This includes how systems are architected, tested, and able to respond to change to ensure the ability to meet business needs without spending resources on unnecessary overhead.

Focus on improving the value that is realized from the cost of utilized resources in a workload. This includes understanding the optimal resources to meet demand and business needs, while evaluating tradeoffs that can reduce costs.

Increase organizational insights across all stakeholders about the costs at a resource, workload, team, organization, and company-wide level. The desired outcome is for all stakeholders to have an understanding and insight into how their decisions affect the cost of a workload throughout its lifecycle.

Focus on improving the overall sustainability of workloads in alignment with established sustainability goals. This includes understanding which architectural and operational decisions can help improve the sustainability of a workload.

Increase organizational insights across all stakeholders about sustainability goals and impacts at a resource, workload, team, organization, and company-wide level. The desired outcome is for all stakeholders to have an understanding and insight into how their decisions affect sustainability organizationally.

Improve high-level knowledge across the AWS Well-Architected Framework pillars of operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability. Cover the principles that will help your teams understand fundamental AWS architectural and operational best practices.