Serverless Craic Ep14 Our Favourite AWS Well Architected Pillars

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Over the last six episodes, we have gone over the well architected framework from AWS. As a recap, we think this is a fantastic framework. It's about your workloads. Like a physical building, if the foundation is not solid, it may cause structural problems that undermine the integrity and function of the building. So you need to look at all six pillars for your workloads. And that's what you do to effectively produce sound and stable systems.

Operational excellence: it's the ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value, and continually improve support, processes and procedures.

Security: the ability to protect information systems and assets, while delivering business value through the risk assessments and mitigation strategies.

Reliability: the ability for systems to recover infrastructure or service failures, acquire computing resources to meet demand and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations, or transit network issues.

Performance efficiency: the ability to use compute resources effectively to meet system requirements, and maintain efficiency.

Cost optimization: the ability to avoid or eliminate unneeded cost.

Sustainability: guidance on how AWS can help you reduce your footprint and best practices to improve the sustainability of your workloads.

Mike's favourite is: operational excellence. I'm a big fan of continuous improvement and getting yourself into a sustainable way of working. How do you learn from failure? How do you react to certain things? How do you have visibility of everything around you? If you can assemble that apparatus and those behaviours, then you can begin to eat into the other pillars. For example, operational excellence gets into how to observe if something's working in production, or if something's failing in production. If something's failing in production, how do you deal with it? If I'm going into a new team or area, I'll always start with operational excellence. This one is very consistent across all squads and all parts of the organisation. That's probably my favourite, because I know it so well and I rely on it.

Mark's favourite is the sustainability pillar. I think it if you have all other things in place, the sustainability pillar will really drive you to that next level. If you're trying to deliver a sustainable solution, you can't do that without having a good handle on the other five pillars. So I think sustainability and the sustainability pillars and the questions within them, are a forcing function for good practices, processes and architectural choices that the other pillars are continuing. With our serverless first mindset and approach I think it lends itself well to the sustainability pillar.

Dave likes security, reliability, cost optimization. The reason why I like those three is because they're things that a different team does. If a team thinks they're really good but completes one of those pillars, they realise there's a bunch of stuff they've never thought about but actually is their responsibility. The most shocking one is probably cost optimization. Most teams don't really think about cost. There's usually an IT manager somewhere who does it. It's magic and it happens in the background. But when you start asking teams about how they monitor or control their

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