AWS is its own special beast–with a huge number of products and services added each month, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed at all AWS’s cloud offerings. Fortunately, there are ways to proactively ensure you’re maximizing your utilization. AWS released a whitepaper a few months ago highlighting some of the best practices of using its cloud. The AWS Well-Architected Framework is based on four pillars—security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. These pillars are good refreshers to keep in mind at any stage of your AWS use.
Security
According to AWS, this is “the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies.” Within this pillar, there are a number of principles to strengthen your overall system’s security.
Rather than simply running security appliances, such as firewalls, at the edge of your infrastructure, it’s best to apply security at all layers. This includes every virtual server, load balancer and network subnet. Also be sure to log and audit all action and changes to your environment. If you can enable traceability, your security will improve.
It’s also a wise idea to look into automation. Monitor and automatically trigger responses to event-driven alerts, and create an entire infrastructure that’s defined and managed in a template. Having these security mechanisms in place will increase a business’s ability to securely scale while saving time and cost. One benefit of partnering with a managed service provider (MSP) is that it’s a lot easier to get these automated processes into place. Not only will you be able to spend more time focusing on your business goals, the more you automate, the more available resources are freed up in the long run.
Reliability
AWS defines this as “the ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues.”
More than any other, this pillar will challenge your ability to recover. In the cloud, you can test how your system fails, and can lock in your recovery procedures. Again, automation is your friend here—use it to simulate different failures, or to recreate situations that led to failures in the past. This unveils failure pathways that can be fixed before an actual failure scenario happens.
Develop key performance indicators (KPIs) to trigger automation when a threshold is breached. This will automatically track and notify you of any failures. This is another way to get ahead of any failure. The last thing you want to do is react to a failure. The more proactive you can be, the better.
A common cause of failure is resource saturation. This happens when the demands placed on a system are greater than the actual capacity of that system. A MSP can monitor demand and how the system is being utilized, and automate the addition or removal of resources as needed, ensuring you’re remaining at an optimal level.
Performance Efficiency
This pillar “focuses on the efficient use of computing resources to meet requirements, and maintaining that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.”
Instead of having your IT team learn how to host and run a new technology, like NoSQL databases, media transcoding and machine learning, you can have an MSP handle it. That allows you to focus on product development. And why stop within your own country? You can deploy your system around the world in a few simple clicks, providing lower latency and a better overall experience for your customers, while keeping costs down.
You can also use “server-less” architectures, which, in addition to lowering transactional costs, removes the operational burden of managing a server. For instance, storage services can act as static websites. This takes away a need for a web server, while AWS’s event services can host the code.
With these virtual and automated resources, you can be a little more experimental with your testing, taking advantage of different types of instances, storage or configurations.
Cost Optimization
The final pillar assesses “your ability to avoid or eliminate unneeded costs or suboptimal resources, and use those savings on differentiated benefits for your business. A cost-optimized system allows you to pay the lowest price possible while still achieving your business objectives and meeting, or exceeding, key requirements for the other Well-Architected pillars. You can achieve cost optimization using techniques to select the appropriate architecture, reduce unused resources, and select the most economical approach.”
Nearly every business will agree that if they could cut costs, their operation would improve. The cloud allows you to do that through a number of ways. For starters, it’s a lot easier to identify the cost of a system, helping identify return on investment. Find the areas where you’re not maximizing efficiency and address them.
The cloud also lets you shine your focus on what’s most important to your business and customers. You can work on projects while a MSP builds and powers servers, tasks your IT department would have to spend time doing otherwise. Spending money on data center operations, especially before you even know how you’ll use them, is not effective or efficient. By turning to a MSP, you’ll remove that burden from your team, and can optimize your spending.
Stopping resources when they’re not in use is another benefit of the cloud, and will keep overall costs to a minimum. Setting up an effective monitoring, reporting framework and management level visibility to identify these opportunities is key for effective cost optimization. In addition, hundreds of thousands of customers are aggregated in the AWS cloud, which translates to lower variable costs.
The benefits to using AWS cloud are many—we recommend taking a step back once in a while to ensure you’re maximizing your infrastructure. For more information, please visit our Managed Cloud for AWS page.
About David Lucky
