How the AWS Well-Architected Framework Drives Growth for Customers and APN Partners

By Jon Ruggles, Director of Client Strategies at Five Talent

As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) authorized reviewer, Five Talent is redesigning its business from traditional software development to solutions architecture based on the 5 Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

The move is transforming our consulting approach, from how we onboard clients and projects to how we recruit and train cloud architects.

In this post, we’ll discuss how leveraging the AWS Well-Architected Framework Review accelerates new business opportunities for AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners and gives customers a holistic, comprehensive process for managing cloud technology and understanding its impact on their business.

Five Talent is an APN Advanced Consulting Partner with the AWS Mobile Competency and AWS Lambda Service Delivery designation. Our team of AWS-certified technology advisors focuses on creating solutions for custom applications, hardware integration, and startups and enterprise organizations that enhance business agility.

Scaling to Meet Demand

Over the last year, Five Talent has implemented the Well-Architected Framework to help large enterprise customers, mid-sized companies, and startups across the globe. For our client Verdant Web Technologies, a well-timed review launched new product innovation, catalyzed pipeline growth, and led to the deployment of a high-performing, secure, and reliable framework capable of scaling to meet market demand.

A SaaS-based startup, Verdant delivers web-based hazard management solutions to track, access, and update facility Environmental Health & Safety (EH&S) records and compliance.

Prior to hiring Five Talent, Verdant’s leadership team struggled with how to expand its operations beyond the U.S. and solidify credibility with enterprise-level prospects and clients. It was clear Verdant needed a well-defined pathway for building secure, cost-effective solutions supported by a continual improvement process that optimized performance.

Well-Architected Review and Implementation

During our review and remediation, Five Talent identified 23 issues that were exposing Verdant to risk and hurting their opportunity to win larger customers. Using the Well-Architected Framework, it took our Five Talent team only four months to resolve them all.

In addition, documenting the architecture with the Well-Architected lens has reduced Verdant’s due diligence process with client prospects by 50 percent, shortened their sales cycle, and dramatically improved their return on capital investments.

Key results of this process based on the 5 Pillars include:

Operational Excellence: Documented and automated CI/CD pipeline and introduced automated tests, reducing roll backs from an average of 1-2 per month to zero.
Security: Reduced identified security issues by 96 percent while increasing Recovery Time Objective (RTO) by 94 percent (from 4 hours to 15 minutes) with no cost increase. We also helped Verdant increase Recovery Point Objective (RPO) by 92 percent (from 2 hours to 10 minutes) with no cost increase.
Reliability: Adjusted and configured custom software to ensure high availability and leverage dynamically scalable computing resources.
Performance Efficiency: Increased client scalability opportunities by 1,000 percent within the same cost structure. We also increased response time from 15 seconds to 2 seconds by moving to solutions such as Amazon ElastiCache, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS).
Cost Optimization: Implemented a resource consumption model of scaling servers horizontally to reduce AWS hosting costs by 50 percent in the next year.

Since completing the Well-Architected review and remediation process, Verdant remains in constant dialogue and collaboration with our team at Five Talent regarding the impact of architectural decisions on their business strategies and outcomes.

With annual reviews in place, Five Talent has ongoing opportunities to help Verdant reduce costs, improve security, stay reliable, and make their offerings more scalable for strategic growth.

The Power of Partnership

As an APN Partner, integrating the Well-Architected Framework has also had a significant impact on Five Talent’s opportunities and operations.

While our company leverages the Well-Architected Framework to review and remediate current client solutions, we use the same methodology with new clients for architecting new products and services. This dual lens approach has created an increasing flow of successful projects that is driving the firm’s rapid growth.

Five Talent’s expanding pipeline has empowered us to invest more heavily in internal training that supports developers at all levels along a career path towards advanced AWS certifications.

With as many Solutions Architects (SAs) as companies 20 times our size, Five Talent emphasizes the importance of using the 5 Pillars to anchor client communication with a shared language and understanding. The approach guides our SAs to consider the larger business implications of their architecture decisions, establishing collaborative client relationships that strengthen and evolve over time.

Whether exploring growth markets, new business strategies, or design concepts, Five Talent is committed to the AWS Well-Architected Framework and best practices it represents. Ultimately, our partnership with AWS reflects a shared ethos of putting customers first and dedicating efforts to building their long term success.

About the AWS Well-Architected Framework

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps cloud architects build the most secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure possible for their applications. This framework provides a consistent approach for customers and APN Partners to evaluate architectures, and provides guidance to implement designs that scale with application needs over time.

Learn more about the AWS Well-Architected Framework >>

Next Steps

You can learn more about the Well-Architected Framework by taking the AWS self-paced training that provides pillar-specific design principles and best practices. The training is free, and takes approximately one hour to complete.

Register and launch AWS training >>

The content and opinions in this blog are those of the third party author and AWS is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this post.

Five Talent – APN Partner Spotlight

Five Talent is an AWS Competency Partner. Their seasoned professionals collaborate with customers to ideate and evaluate the technology service solutions that best drive business goals and budget. AWS Certified technology advisers create solutions for custom applications, hardware integration, and startups and enterprise organizations.

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