AWS Training and Certification Blog

5 steps to learn AWS best practices and become Well-Architected

AWS Well-Architected first started 11 years ago as an idea. It was a set of questions on papers created by a group of AWS Solutions Architects (SAs) based on their experience in the field. The goal was to run the questions by customers to help them determine if they were following best practices when they built applications on AWS—to help them decide if they were Well-Architected.

Fast-forward to today, the AWS Well-Architected Framework (WAF) has continued to evolve with the cumulative experiences and best practices SAs have built over time by working with customers of all sizes and industries, and understanding their architecture patterns. Establishing these architecture patterns enable SAs to continuously share updates of the framework best practices and help customers to identify both risks and potential improvements in their workloads and/or processes.

As a Solutions Architect on the AWS Well-Architected Team, my customers frequently ask me: What is the best way to learn AWS best practices? How do other customers implement this architecture? How can I make sure my organization is following best practices consistently and at scale?

Answers to all these questions are in the AWS Well-Architected Framework. And, the concepts are covered in detail in AWS Well-Architected Foundations training course from AWS Training and Certification. This three-hour digital course teaches you how to use the AWS Well-Architected Framework to understand the risks in your architecture
and ways to mitigate them, along with interactive knowledge checks with detailed feedback within each module. When you pass the assessment, you’ll earn a Well-Architected Proficient digital badge that you can share with your network.

In this blog post, I will share 5 tips and associated resources, including what the modules cover in the new training course, to help you start learning and using the Framework. We’ll discuss the value propositions of the Well-Architected Framework, the phases of Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR), the AWS Well-Architected Tool (AWS WA Tool), the pillars, their design principles, and best practices.

1.      Learn the value of AWS Well-Architected Framework (WAF)

The WAF consists of design principles and best practices that span six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. Creating a technology solution is a lot like constructing a physical building. In order to ensure the building is functional, you have to make sure its foundation is solid and meets the industry-standard requirements. The six pillars are the foundation of your architecture and must be incorporated in your design to get a stable and efficient system.

When designing a product or a service, your design principles are statements that describe the most important goals the product should deliver for customers. They are used to frame design decisions. The actual recommendation to comply with design principles are best practices.

WAF’s value comes from the consistent approach it provides to cloud architects that enables them to learn the best practices, measure their architecture against these best practices, and identify areas for improvement. Repeating this process, using tools and resources that we will discuss later, creates a continuous improvement lifecycle that you can apply on every workload in your organization and can scale, customize, and automate as needed. We call this process a Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR).

For more details on the concepts discussed in this section check AWS Well-Architected training course – Module 1.

2.      Learn the Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR)

The ultimate goal of WAFR is to identify High Risk Issues (HRI)/Medium Risk Issues (MRI) in your architecture and create a treatment plan to remediate them. There are three phases to conduct WAFR.

The first phase is preparation where you identify the workload to review. You also identify a team of SMEs (sometimes called sponsors) in your organization across the six pillars to answer the review questions and, later, make decisions on how to remediate risks. It’s recommended that you review your workload across the six pillars of the framework early on in the design phase. This gives you an opportunity to make changes before the go-live date. In some cases, you may choose to review the workload against a specific pillar. For example, you may have an immediate goal to optimize the cost of your architecture, so you decide to review the Cost Efficiency Pillar specifically. In this phase, you scope the pillars to be reviewed as well.

The second phase is to conduct the actual review session. The review can be conducted in one session or multiple. It should be a light weight process, conversational, and not an audit. You’ll use the AWS Well-Architected Tool (AWS WA Tool) to go over the questions of each pillar and validate that best practices are implemented. During this process, you will be provided with additional context and resources in the AWS WA Tool to help you understand the intent of each question and answer it. If you are working with your assigned AWS SA, they will help you with this process.

The last phase is to improve your workload. In this phase, you prioritize the risks you identified in the review phase and make a treatment plan to remediate some or all of them based on your organization needs.

To get the most out of WAFR, it should be a step in a continuous improvement process that you apply at key milestones in the product lifecycle, and not a one-time snapshot. It’s also improvement to that all the stakeholders in your organization participate and take a role during the review to ensure accuracy in identifying risks.

For more details on the concepts discussed in this section check AWS Well-Architected training course – Module 2.

3.      Learn the AWS Well-Architected Tool (AWS WA Tool)

The AWS WA Tool is designed to help you review the state of your applications and workloads, providing a central place for architectural best practices and guidance. In addition to the standard guidance provided by the Framework AWS WA Tool helps you define your own (or your organization’s) best practices guidance using custom lenses.

Similar to many other AWS services, AWS WA Tool can be accessed using the AWS Management Console or programmatically through robust API. After reviewing the workload and generating the risks/improvements report, you can provide access to the respective teams in your organization for further review/actions. When a risk is remediated, you can make a note and create a milestone in the review to track progress overtime.

For more details on the concepts discussed in this section check AWS Well-Architected training course – Module 3.

Full details of AWS WA Tool.

4.      Learn the design principles and best practices of each WAF pillar

Lastly, let’s dive deep into the WAF pillars and their design principles and best practices. There are two types of design principles in the Framework.

The first is general design principles. General design principles apply to all workloads in cloud regardless of pillars. For example, “Test system at production scale” is a general design principle that you’ll always want to comply with when you build applications on cloud. Any cloud.

The second is design principles specific to each pillar. As the name implies, these are specific to the context of the pillar they belong to. For example, a Reliability Pillar’s design principles is to “Test recovery procedure”.

Design principles are implemented by following best practices, and are divided into multiple areas of coverage. For example, the best practices of the Reliability Pillars are divided into 4 areas: Foundations, Workload Architecture, Change Management and Failure Management.

For more details on the concepts discussed in this section check AWS Well-Architected training course – Modules 3 to Module 8.

Whitepaper of six pillars, design principles, and best practices.

5.      Leverage AWS Well-Architected resources

A learning journey is never complete without hands-on. After you familiarize yourself with the framework, the review process, the tools, and the best practices associated with each pillar, you may find yourself interested in learning how to implement these best practices, or some of them, based on your organization requirements. For that, check out the AWS Well-Architected Lab and our AWS Builder Labs to grow your hands-on skills.

The AWS Well-Architected Lab contains hand-on lab exercises for virtually every best practice covered in the Framework across all the six pillars. It’s also an open-source environment, so you’re welcome to provide feedback or contribute.

AWS Builder Labs help learners gain technical AWS Cloud skills via hands-on, interactive learning in an AWS Management Console practice environment. With guided exercises and step-by-step instructions, AWS Builder Labs help individuals develop practical skills for common cloud scenarios. You receive a sandbox AWS account for the duration of the lab and there is no need for you to use your own AWS account and risk accruing unwanted charges. You can access the following labs, and 150+ more with an AWS Skill Builder subscription.

Here are some other useful resources to review:

Conclusion

By using the AWS Well-Architected Framework, you will learn architecture best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, sustainable and cost-effective systems in the cloud. The Well-Architected Framework Review is a process that helps you to measure your workload against best practices and improve your architecture. I hope you’ll take full advantage of the myriad source materials, documentation, and training to help you learn and follow this process.