Announcing the End User Computing Lens for the Well-Architected Framework

Today we are delighted to introduce the End User Computing (EUC) Lens , an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Well-Architected whitepaper. Using the AWS Well-Architected Framework, the end user computing lens outlines steps for performing an AWS Well-Architected review. This empowers customers to assess and identify technical risks. The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides a consistent approach for customers to evaluate architectures and implement scalable designs. This whitepaper covers common end user computing scenarios and identifies key workload elements. These allow you to architect your environments according to best practices gathered from thousands of customer interactions.

Further, the end user computing Lens provides specific best practices and implementation guidance for customers. This can be employed to deliver high-performance, reliable environments that provide an optimized user experience. All with an eye toward maintaining a cost-effective and sustainable approach.

The end user computing lens joins a collection of lenses that focus on specialized workloads such as the Internet of Things (IoT), games and artificial intelligence (AI). You can find more information on AWS Well-Architected lenses in the AWS Well-Architected User Guide.

What is the End User Computing Lens?

The end user computing lens is a collection of customer-proven design principles and best practices to help you adopt a cloud-native approach to using AWS end user computing services. These recommendations are based on insights that AWS has gathered from customers, AWS Partners, the community, and our own end user computing technical specialist communities.

The lens highlights some of the most common areas for assessment and improvement. It is designed to align with and provide insights across the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework:

• Operational excellence focuses on running and monitoring end user environments to deliver business value and continually improve processes and procedures. End user computing topics include lifecycle management for images and implementing observability into your images and environments.
• Security focuses on protecting information and systems. End user computing topics include ensuring least privilege permissions for your users interacting with applications, access control to your infrastructure, vulnerability detection and mitigation, minimizing attack surface for images, and handling sensitive data.
• Reliability focuses on ensuring an end user environment performs correctly and consistently when it’s expected to. End user computing topics include monitoring and tracking resource consumption, implementing automation, rolling out updates, and monitoring the health of your end user applications and desktops.
• Performance efficiency focuses on using IT and computing resources efficiently. End user computing topics include reducing image sizes, improving user experience, and updating images across the organization.
• Cost optimization focuses on avoiding unnecessary costs. End user computing topics include designing images for efficient use, designing AppStream 2.0 environments to automatically scale, using different compute type instances, and reducing login times.
• Sustainability focuses on minimizing the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads. End user computing topics include designing images to be rightsized for the application workloads and users and using energy-efficient hardware to deliver desktops and applications.

The end user computing lens provides guidance that can help you make appropriate design decisions in line with your business requirements. These are based on lessons AWS has learned from customers who have built their end user solutions on AWS. By applying the techniques in this lens to your architecture, you can validate the resilience and efficiency of your design. This lens also provides recommendations to address any gaps you might identify. We expect customers to use this lens as a supplement to the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Who should use the End User Computing Lens?

The end user computing lens is intended for all AWS customers who use AWS end user computing services such as Amazon AppStream 2.0 and Amazon WorkSpaces. The lens provides guidance on how to build secure, efficient, and reliable end user computing services to deliver desktops and applications to users.

We believe that the lens will be valuable regardless of your cloud adoption stage. Value can be derived whether you are launching your first end user computing environment on AWS or migrating end user computing services to the cloud. Customers working to improve existing AWS end user computing workloads will also find value in the best practices and recommendations.

The material is intended to support customers in roles such as architect, developer, and operations team members.

What are the next steps?

The end user computing lens is available now in the AWS Documentation to use in a self-service fashion. If you require additional guidance, contact your AWS account team to engage an end user computing specialist solution architect.

AWS is committed to the end user computing lens as an evolving tool. As the AWS end user computing services evolve and new AWS services become available, we will update the end user computing lens accordingly. Our mission will always be to help you design and deploy well-architected applications so that you can focus on delivering on your business objectives.

Learn more about supported end user computing solutions, customer case studies, and additional resources at End User Computing at AWS.

Contributors

The authors would like to thank the following people for their invaluable help in developing this new End User Computing Lens for the AWS Well-Architected Framework

• Mark Homer, EMEA End User Computing Solution Architect Manager, Amazon Web Services
• Klaus Becker, Senior EMEA End User Computing Specialist Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
• Peter David, Senior EMEA End User Computing Specialist Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
• Thomas Sagaspe, France End User Computing Specialist Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Service
• Dylan Barlett, Senior Developer Advocate, Amazon WorkSpaces, Amazon Web Services
• Sai Sanjay Garishe, Technical Account Manager, US-DNB-Games, Amazon Web Services
• Jeremy Schiefer, Principal Security Solutions Architect, WWPS, Amazon Web Services
• Bruce Ross, Well-Architected Lens Leader, Amazon Web Services

About the Authors

Mark Homer

Mark Homer is the EMEA Solution Architect Manager for End User Computing based in the United Kingdom. He is passionate about working with customers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa to support them on their journeys adopting and scaling AWS workloads.

Jeremy Schiefer

Jeremy Schiefer is a Principal Security Solutions Architect in Public Sector. Jeremy is passionate about helping customers improve their security posture.