The Well-Architected Framework Pillars
The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides architectural best practices across six pillars to help you design and operate reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable workloads in the cloud.
The Six Pillars
The six pillars are: Operational Excellence (run and monitor systems), Security (protect information and systems), Reliability (recover from failures), Performance Efficiency (use computing resources efficiently), Cost Optimization (avoid unnecessary costs), and Sustainability (minimize environmental impact).
Operational Excellence
Operational Excellence focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business value and continuously improve supporting processes and procedures. Key practices include automating changes, responding to events, and defining standards.
Security
Security focuses on protecting information and systems. Key areas include identity and access management, detective controls, infrastructure protection, data protection, and incident response.
Reliability
Reliability focuses on the ability to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions. Key practices include testing recovery procedures, automatically recovering from failures, and scaling horizontally.
Performance Efficiency
Performance Efficiency focuses on using computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve. Key practices include selecting the right resource types and sizes, monitoring performance, and making trade-offs.
Cost Optimization
Cost Optimization focuses on avoiding or eliminating unneeded cost or suboptimal resources. Key practices include adopting a consumption model, measuring and monitoring, stopping spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting, and analyzing and attributing expenditure.
Sustainability
Sustainability focuses on minimizing the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads. Key practices include understanding your impact, establishing sustainability goals, maximizing utilization, anticipating and adopting new, more efficient hardware and software offerings, and using managed services.