AWS has overhauled its AWS Well-Architected Framework – which lets users review architectures across six areas: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.
AWS said the refreshed toolkit provides “more prescriptive guidance on building and operating in the cloud… to stay up-to-date on the latest architectural best practices in a constantly evolving technological landscape.”
AWS users can review the updated guidance here – which is also available with “lenses” for specific use-cases. These include “lenses” for machine learning (ML), data analytics, serverless, high performance computing (HPC), Internet of Things, SAP, streaming media, the games industry, hybrid networking, and financial services
It also offers updated guidance for those building SaaS tools on AWS infrastructure who want to be mindful of sustainability performance, with fresh guidance across four sustainability pillars that spans the following (which in turn each have their own subsets of guidance, some of it more helpful than others with plenty of it fairly basic in nature, e.g. “maximize infrastructure sharing to promote reduced energy consumption.”)
- SaaS SUS 1: “How do you use deployment models (silo, bridge, pool) to align tenant consumption with resource utilization?”
- SaaS SUS 2: “How do you maximize the value from the resources that the SaaS environment consumes?”
- SaaS SUS 3: “Do you have a tenant off-boarding plan for inactive tenants? How do you decommission tenant resources that are not being used to limit or prevent waste?”
- SaaS SUS 4: “How do you provide per-tenant footprint visibility (such as resource utilization and carbon emission data) in your SaaS environment?”
See also: AWS’s carbon emissions calculator damned with faint praise
Much of the sustainability guidance in the AWS Well-Architected Framework is around pragmatic resource optimisation: A snapshot: “Have a complete end-to-end automated tenant onboarding process that maps the tenancy models to the resources that are provisioned at each architecture layer or component. Also have detailed insights into the footprint and consumption costs and tradeoffs associated with each of these models.”
Critics who feel AWS’s carbon footprint tool leaves a great deal to be desired will not find succour here.
Azure also offers its own recently updated well-architected framework here and The Stack is resharing both as amid an overwhelming plethora of tools and services landing monthly from the large cloud providers, it can be helpful to be reminded of some back-to-basics principles and toolkits – AWS’s framework comes with the free AWS Well-Architected Tool, which lets customers review and measure architecture using the framework and despite some of our minor gripes above, the framework is an invaluable resource that deserves a fresh review.
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