Track your workload’s risks with the new AWS Well-Architected Tool Connector for Jira

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a collection of best practices that helps customers build and operate secure, high-performing, resilient, and cost-effective workloads on the AWS Cloud. With the AWS Well-Architected Tool (AWS WA Tool), you can review the state of your applications and workloads against architectural best practices, identify opportunities for improvement, and track progress over time. Tracking the progress of remediation is crucial because it allows you to continuously improve the architecture of your applications and workloads, ensuring they remain aligned with best practices as your business requirements evolve.

In this blog, we will demonstrate how you can use the new AWS Well-Architected Tool connector for Jira to streamline the remediation tracking process of your workload review, providing a seamless experience in tracking the improvement plan, and a centralized location to store and track information of related activities.

AWS Well-Architected connector for Jira overview

The AWS Well-Architected Tool connector for Jira is a feature that allows you to efficiently track your workload risks and improvement efforts in Jira Cloud, eliminating the need to manually update improvements in the AWS Well-Architected Tool as they are completed. It offers a two-way integration, where a sub-task is created in the Jira project for each best practice that is not followed for a given workload review. Once the improvement recommendations are addressed and the Jira sub-task is completed, the relevant best practice checkboxes for that workload in the AWS Well-Architected Tool will be updated as completed, building a closed-loop mechanism between Jira and your workload in the AWS Well-Architected Tool. In the following section we will go through in more details on how you can use this feature.

Setting up the AWS Well-Architected connector for Jira app

To begin using the feature, you will need to install and configure the AWS Well-Architected Tool connector for Jira app, by going to your AWS WA Tool Settings and click on the link button presented under the “Jira account syncing” sections that will take you to the Jira Marketplace website.

Figure 1. AWS Well-Architected Tool Settings

In the Jira marketplace site, you can click on the “Get it Now” button to install the app in your Jira account, and navigate to the “Manage apps” section in your Jira account to configure the connection to your AWS account. To do this, you can click on the “Get Started” and then “Connect a new AWS Account” button, as shown in the screenshot below.

Figure 2. AWS Well-Architected Tool Connector App in Jira

From the app configuration page, you will need to select the AWS Regions where your AWS WA Tool workloads are located, along with the related AWS Identity Access Management credentials to allow this Jira app to communicate with the AWS WA Tool in your AWS account. You can follow the user instructions here for more details.

Configuring syncing options

Once the app is installed and configured, you can now enable the synchronization method between the AWS WA Tool and Jira Cloud.
To do this, you can once again go to the Settings section of the AWS WA Tool, which if you have configured the application successfully should have the “Jira app connection status” as configured. From there you can click on the “Edit” button in the “Jira account syncing” section.

Figure 3. Account Synchronization in the AWS Well-Architected Tool

At this point, once you’ve turned on Jira account syncing, you will find the option to configure the sync in 2 modes Automatic or Manual.

Figure 4. Configuring Jira Account Syncing

The Automatic sync mode allows you to synchronize all existing and new workloads as well as their improvement items with Jira Cloud, which simplifies your configuration process. With Automatic sync mode enabled, every time a question is answered in your AWS WA Tool workload, a Jira Story is automatically created or update

Alternatively, with Manual sync mode you can have a more granular control on Jira syncing by tracking only specific improvement items (e.g. specific pillars, questions or lenses). Once Manual mode is configured, a “Sync with Jira” button will be displayed at the top right side of the workload page.

Figure 5. Manual Sync with Jira in the AWS Well-Architected Tool

Selecting the “Sync with Jira” button will take you to the area that allows you to select which improvement items in your lens you would like to synchronize with your Jira Cloud account as shown in the screenshot below.

Figure 6. Manual Sync Properties in the AWS Well-Architected Tool

Once you select all the AWS Well-Architected questions under the desired lens that you would like to sync to your Jira Cloud project, you can click on the “Sync” button to start the synchronization.

Syncing to another Jira project

By default, the AWS Well-Architected Tool connector for Jira synchronizes all improvement items into a new Jira Cloud project named “Well-Architected” with a project key called “WA”. However, there will be cases where you already have an existing project in Jira cloud that you would like to use to manage your improvement activities. And in this case, if you would like to configure the synchronization to another existing Jira project, you can choose to overwrite them by selecting the “Override default Jira Project key” option (available under the “Jira account syncing” section of the WA Tool settings) and specifying your own Jira project key.

Figure 7. Overriding Default Jira Project Key in the AWS Well-Architected Tool

Overriding the configurations at workload level

On top of that, when working with your Well-Architected Review, there may be cases where you need your Jira Project key and synchronization configuration to be different from one workload to another. In this case, the feature also provides you with the flexibility to override the settings at the workload level. You can configure this upon creation of your new workload, when you specify the workload properties.

Figure 8. Overriding Account Level Jira Syncing Settings in the AWS Well-Architected Tool

Or you can modify from existing one by going to the “Properties” tab and “Edit” the Jira section.

Figure 9. Overriding Account Level Jira Syncing Settings in the AWS Well-Architected Tool

Navigating the Jira project tasks

Once you have configured the sync and project settings of the WA tool connector for Jira, improvement items from the WA tool will be translated into Jira issues. The integration will translate into the following structure:

To help you better visualize this structure, in the image below, you can see the Jira epic named as a combination of the workload name (for example, “My Workload”) together with the lens name (in this case, “AWS Well-Architected Framework”). You can also see the list of questions from the AWS WA Tool in the form of Jira stories, with the question ID as the prefix.

Figure 10. Sample Workload in Jira

Diving one step deeper into each Jira story (or question), you will find the list of best practices for those questions in the form of Jira sub-tasks. Along with the Lens, Pillar, and Risk Level as labels in the story.

Figure 11. Sample Workload in Jira

Within each Jira sub-task (or best practice), you will find a link in the description area that will take you to the whitepaper documentation of the specific best practice, where you will find further details

Figure 12. Sample AWS Well-Architected Best Practice Documentation in Jira

To assist you further in identifying which Jira issues in your project belong to your workload, you can find a hyperlink reference to the related Jira Story under the Improvement Plan tab within the lens for your specific workload.

Figure 13. Sample Improvement Plan in the AWS Well-Architected Tool

Conclusion

In summary the AWS Well-Architected Tool connector for Jira is a feature that enables efficient tracking of workload risks and improvement efforts in Jira Cloud. It eliminates the need for manual updates in the AWS Well-Architected Tool by creating a two-way integration. For each best practice not followed in a workload review, a sub-task is created in the Jira project. Once the improvement recommendations are addressed and the Jira sub-task is completed, the relevant best practice checkboxes for that workload in the AWS Well-Architected Tool are updated as completed, establishing a closed-loop mechanism between Jira and the AWS Well-Architected Tool.

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