Your organization may be developing applications to be hosted in the cloud, or they may want to move some or all of current IT operations to the cloud. Regardless of the reason or scenario, your organization’s applications/work-loads that are moved to the cloud will be hosted on a variety of cloud services maintained and provided by the cloud provider. The most popular public cloud provider competitors to AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, have been in operation for well over a decade. During this time, there have been many lessons learned by all cloud providers and customers; what works and what needs to be refined. This learned experience has resulted in many best practices that have been tested and refined for a variety of development and deployment scenarios. Each customer, before moving to the public cloud should take advan-tage of this documented experience, called the Well-Architected Framework. Microsoft Azure has released the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/framework/), and Google has a Google Cloud Architecture Framework (https://cloud.google.com/ architecture/framework).
The focus of this chapter, and indeed the book, is the pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate website states that “The focus of this certification is on the design of cost and performance optimized solutions, demonstrating a strong understanding of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.”
Selecting the best architectural design for a workload by considering the rel-evant best practices that have been tested in production by thousands of cus-tomers allows organizations to successfully plan for success with a very high degree of confidence. Instead of reacting to a never-ending series of short-term issues and fixes, customers can plan for engineering and operating workloads in the AWS cloud with a proven long-term approach. Whether you have exist-ing systems that you are trying to migrate to the cloud or are building a new project from the ground up, using the AWS Well-Architected Framework will ultimately save your organization a great deal of time by considering many scenarios and ideas for design and deployment that you might not have fully considered.
Keep in mind that you are engineering your workloads for people—your customers. Employees and contractors are building and operating your cloud-based or hybrid deployments, choosing when, where, and how to use the technologies that make sense for each workload deployment. The goal is architecting your operations and workloads to operate successfully in the cloud, meeting and exceeding your business needs and requirements.
“Do I Know This Already?”
The “Do I Know This Already?” quiz allows you to assess whether you should read this entire chapter thoroughly or jump to the “Exam Preparation Tasks” section. If you are in doubt about your answers to these questions or your own assessment of your knowledge of the topics, read the entire chapter. Table 2-1 lists the major headings in this chapter and their corresponding “Do I Know This Already?” quiz questions. You can find the answers in Appendix A, “Answers to the ‘Do I Know This Already?’ Quizzes and Q&A Sections.”
Table 2-1 “Do I Know This Already?” Section-to-Question Mapping
| Foundation Topics Section | Questions |
| The Well-Architected Framework | 1, 2 |
| Designing a Workload SLA | 3, 4 |
| Deployment Methodologies | 5, 6 |
CAUTION The goal of self-assessment is to gauge your mastery of the topics in this chapter. If you do not know the answer to a question or are only partially sure of the answer, you should mark that question as wrong for purposes of the self-assessment. Giving yourself credit for an answer you correctly guess skews your self-assessment results and might provide you with a false sense of security.
- The AWS Well-Architected Framework Sustainability pillar provides guidance on what types of impacts?
- Reliability
- Sizing compute and storage to avoid waste
- Compute performance
- Storage sizing
- Which other AWS Well-Architected Framework pillars does workload reliability also affect?
- Cost Optimization and Sustainability
- Operation Excellence and Sustainability
- Scale and Performance
- Security and Cost Optimization
- A workload SLA is designed to meet what criteria?
- Cloud service SLA
- Service-level objective
- Mean time between failures
- Restore point objective
- What are the metrics used in determining a workload SLA called?
- Service-level indicators
- CloudWatch metrics
- Rules and alerts
- AWS defined SLAs
- Agile development means focusing on what processes at the same time?
- Design, coding, and testing
- Planning and testing
- Planning and coding
- Planning, design, coding, and testing
- What companion process can also be used with the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
- Big Bang development
- Waterfall development
- Agile development
- Twelve-Factor App Methodology