EVOQUE AWS WELL-ARCHITECTED REVIEW

Amazon Web Services (AWS) publishes their best practices and has historically performed Well-Architected Reviews for key customers. We are excited to offer this service to new and existing customers because of the incredible positive impact it can have on the benefit our customers get from public cloud.

Well Architected Benefits are very well documented, and include benefits to: Operations, Security, Reliability, Performance, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. You can imagine how each of these areas can be positively impacted by architecting your workload in a way that takes most advantage of a cloud infrastructure provider like AWS.

OPERATIONS

Run and monitor systems to deliver business value, and continually improve processes and procedures. Key topics include managing and automating changes, responding to events, and defining standards to successfully manage daily operations.

SECURITY

Protect information and systems. Key topics include confidentiality and integrity of data, identifying and managing who can do what with privilege management, protecting systems, and establishing controls to detect security events.

RELIABILITY

Focus on the ability to prevent and quickly recover from failures to meet business and customer demand. Key topics include foundational elements around setup, cross project requirements, recovery planning, and how we handle change.

PERFORMANCE EFFICIENCY

Use IT and computing resources efficiently. Key topics include selecting the right resource types and sizes based on workload requirements, monitoring performance, and making informed decisions to maintain efficiency as business needs evolve.

COST OPTIMIZATION

Avoid un-needed costs. Key topics include understanding and controlling where money is spent, selecting the most appropriate and right number of resource types, analyzing spend over time, and scaling to meet business needs without overspending.

SUSTAINABILITY

Focus on running cloud workloads while reducing environmental impacts. Key topics include minimizing energy consumption and improved efficiency, a shared responsibility model for sustainability, improving utilization, and understanding impact.

An AWS Well Architected Review is pretty painless, but requires involvement from both business and technical stakeholders. It is performed on a workload-by-workload basis. We usually start with a 2-4 hour workshop where we run through a provocative list of questions. Bring your architecture diagrams, they will be pinned up on the wall and relied on heavily! If you don’t have them, no worries, we’ll work our way through it anyway.
We then take away a bunch of information, and sometimes some read-only credentials if you’d like us to take a look in the account and make sure the info we gather is in line with reality. We compile the information into 2 main deliverables: 1) Detailed Score Card, and 2) Remediation Recommendations. The remediations are your roadmap to becoming Well Architected. Get started today!