To enhance your operational excellence, this Guidance is deployed through AWS CloudFormation that helps ensure the successful creation of all required resources and their instrumentation. CloudFormation helps to provision your resources in the cloud through infrastructure as code, providing a template for you to use to deploy this Guidance swiftly. To make any changes, you would need to deploy a new stack that reflects your new version, but the data can be safely migrated between versions. 

The architecture of this Guidance is designed to help you protect your data and systems, control access, and respond automatically to events. First, the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions for all the resources included in this Guidance use the principle of least privilege. Second, the data stored in DynamoDB is encrypted using AWS managed keys. Third, traffic between the Amazon S3 bucket (hosting the frontend of this Guidance), and CloudFront is encrypted, requiring HTTPS for all requests to CloudFront . Fourth, the application is only accessed through the Cognito user pool. And, finally, the JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) are used to secure access to the API Gateway resources.

Amazon S3 , DynamoDB , Lambda , Cognito , and API Gateway are all highly available serverless services that were purpose-built to support a reliable application-level architecture. For example, Amazon S3 provides high durability storage, whereas Lambda enables high-availability by spanning across multiple Availability Zones (AZs). AZs consist of one or more discreet data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, helping to ensure the architecture of this Guidance is both resilient and encompasses a proven failure recovery process. 

By using serverless technologies, you only provision the exact resources you use, enhancing your performance efficiency. Some examples include the use of API Gateway which supports 10000 concurrent requests per second, and CloudFront which allows you to deliver web content hosted on Amazon S3 at low latency. Also, Cognito provides a secure identity store (user pools) that can scale to millions of users.

This Guidance is implemented using serverless services only, and because these services are consumption-based, cost will follow usage. The other benefit of serverless services is that it allows for scaling with usage. Also, this Guidance leverages a common Amazon S3 -hosted, CloudFront -served pattern where you can store, secure, and deliver your static content at scale. API Gateway is also served through the same CloudFront distribution.

By extensively using managed services, such as DynamoDB and Lambda , as well as dynamic scaling, you minimize the environmental impact of the backend services when deploying this Guidance. No component of this Guidance will run without active usage.