Unfloding The Insights: Well-Architected Review

“Evaluation brings evolution.” Think about anything in this globe, Technologies, businesses, why not consider you (individuals), we all evolve after certain evaluation. Isn’t?  The same is applicable to the cloud environment. Well architected review is launched to examine the cloud architecture. Cloud environment is capricious, undergone constant upgrades and deployments. AWS suggests organizations to ingest Well architected review once in the regular basis.  

You might have so many interrogatives like what, why and how, etc., This blog will answer all your queries. Let’s get started. 

What is Well Architected Review? 

At first, Well Architected Review (WAR) is neither a service nor a code. It’s an assessment process to identify the loopholes within the cloud environment. WAR framework has inbuilt tools within it. It generates questions and you need to answer those. WAR examine your cloud environment based upon the answers you provide. After the evaluation process, it provides the feedback and suggestions for improvements. 

Well Architected Review stands along with cloud architects to build a high-performing applications. It is considered as a consistent approach for customers to validate the architecture and implement efficient designs. It includes well-architected tools, domain-specific lenses, and, hands-on-labs. 

The Six Pillars 

In real architecture, four pillars support the building. when it comes to cloud architecture, these six pillars are prominent and equally important. We can say it as six parameters, questions are generated with the intend to measure these six parameters in the cloud architecture. All are equally important to build a strong, reliable, efficient cloud architecture. Which are listed below 

• Operational Excellence Pillar 
• Security Pillar 
• Reliability Pillar 
• Performance Efficiency Pillar 
• Cost Optimization Pillar 
• Sustainability Pillar 

Operational Excellence Pillar: its focal point is constant improvement in processes and procedures. This pillar is responsible for managing daily operations, automations, system monitoring and responding to events 

Security Pillar: The Security pillar is intended to protect system information. Confidentiality, data integrity, user permission management are the key topics here. 

Reliability Pillar: Workload performance is the primary focus for reliability pillar. It is also responsible to recover quicky from the failures. 

Performance Efficiency Pillar: This pillar focuses on streamlining computing resources. resource type selection, workload requirements, performance monitoring are the key topics included. 

Cost Optimization Pillar: Eliminating unnecessary costs are the primary concern for this pillar. Some key topics includes funding allocation, choosing the right resource in right quantity. 

Sustainability Pillar: its focal point is to minimize the environmental impacts in the running workloads. Key topics includes sustainability, reducing downstream impact, maximize the utilization. 

You Might Like: Amazon Opensearch for log analytics

Well-Architected Lenses 

Lenses is used to amplify the assessment process. With lenses, one can specifically choose domains like machine learning, data analytics, IOP, SAP, HPC, etc.,  

If you are belonging to healthcare sector, then you can use Healthcare industry lens to get a precise evaluation. There are a lot of lenses available with the well architecture review, one can choose lens type based upon the industry they belong 

Some other lenses are 

• Data Analytics Lens 
• Container Build Lens 
• SAP Lens 
• Serverless Application Lens 
• Hybrid Networking Lens 
• Game Industry Lens 
• Machine Learning Lens 
• and a lot more 

Well-Architected Tool 

 Well-architected tool helps to review the current state of the applications and workloads which is used to implement improvements, to track progress and incorporate best practices. This tool is available in AWS Management Console which is available for users for free. 

Features 

• Inbuilt APIs: Integrated APIs lets you to extend the functionality and implement best practices  
• Customization: With tools, you can choose the custom lens and pillars to generate questions.  
• Workload and Lenses Sharing: You can easily share the workloads and lenses up to 300 IAM user accounts. 
• Improved Discovery:  AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Service Catalog App Registry are the services help you to answer the questions easily.  
• Sustainability: You can understand the environmental impact and energy consumption of the workloads. 

Well-Architected Guidance 

Well Architected Guidance are used for particular use case, scenarios and technology. For instance, Disaster Recovery of Workloads is a kind of scenario. Users can choose things based upon their requirements. 

Is WAR Important for Cybersecurity?  

There is no such thing that gives 100% protection and security. Everything comes with certain amount of risk in it. No identification and rectification of risks become hazardous to any organization.  

In that way, Well Architected Review helps you to learn from the mistakes rather than learn from tragedies. By conducting WAR on the regular basis, you can instantly identify the areas for improvements and safeguard your cloud environment.  

It helps you more than building a perfect architecture. WAR consolidates the best practices across agile, DevOps and ITIL. 

How Often You need to run AWS Well Architected Review? 

When to do WAR is the most common question. It’s entirely based upon your workloads. As said in the above, cloud environment is not a static idle, it is a constantly changing environment. AWS suggested to conduct WAR every 6 to 12 months to safeguard the cloud architecture.  

Your architecture might look ultra-secure now but after few months it may need some improvements because of the new integrated services or deployments. It’s good to stay in the safer side, rather than suffering heavily. 

How Continuuminnovations can help you with this? 

 We can help companies in conducting WAR to strengthen the architecture so that companies need not to get into these complex processes and can focus on their business models.  

 Our way of handling is explained below. 

 1. Initial meeting 

 At first, our cloud experts collaborate with you and get to understand your workflow, workloads and the complexity of your current architecture 

 2. Review meeting 

 Review meeting is where the actual assessment takes place. With the help of tools and lenses, the questions can be customed. Your answers are helpful to determine how perfect your architecture is. 

 3. WAR Report 

 The Report is generated based on your answers. Areas needs improvements are represented as High risk and medium risk. Our experts rectify those highlighted risks immediately and strengthened the cloud environment.