To succeed in the cloud you need to build an infrastructure that meets the demands of your application, can scale for future growth, and aligns with industry best practices. That’s part of what makes the AWS Well-Architected Framework such a great asset to cloud architects. MSP partners can become a trusted advisor throughout the cloud adoption lifecycle by helping to properly manage and scale their customers’ cloud program by aligning to the framework.
CloudHealth can help you to position your own and your customers’ cloud environment with components of each pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, including complete alignment for the cost optimization pillar.
The five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework
Each pillar is qualified by a set of foundational questions that help you to understand if a specific architecture aligns well with cloud best practices. They prompt you to ask if your idea accomplishes each focused area—so think of them as your personal checklist. Below we cover the overarching idea of the five pillars and one question for each pillar touching on the real ways CloudHealth helps:
Operational Excellence
Does the specific architecture have the ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures?
AWS Well-Architected Framework question
What factors drive your understanding of operational health?
How CloudHealth helps
Track nonfunctional operations using Cost Reports (e.g., Cost History Report) and Performance Reports (e.g., EC2 Instance Performance Report). Reporting on functional aspects such as application responsiveness is not currently supported.
Security
Does the specific architecture have the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies?
AWS Well-Architected Framework question
How are you protecting access to and use of the AWS root account credentials?
How CloudHealth helps
Build a security policy that checks for root account credentials that are not protected by MFA tokens. You can implement CloudHealth’s Default Security Policy and subscribe to the Health Check Pulse report, which contains a section that tracks security vulnerabilities.
Reliability
Does the specific architecture have 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?
AWS Well-Architected Framework question
How does your system adapt to changes in demand?
How CloudHealth helps
Employ CloudHealth Rightsizing capabilities to ensure that your cloud assets are being well utilized for the workloads that you deploy on them. Build an instance or volume rightsizing policy that constantly monitors your infrastructure for rightsizing opportunities. Subscribe to the Health Check Pulse report, which contains a section that tracks underutilized instances and volumes.
Performance Efficiency
Does the specific architecture have the ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve?
AWS Well-Architected Framework question
How do you select the best performing architecture?
How CloudHealth helps
Gather your AWS resources into meaningful groups using CloudHealth Perspectives. Review Performance Reports (e.g. EC2 Instance Performance Report) by Perspective to identify bottlenecks in your infrastructure.
Cost Optimization
Does the specific architecture have the ability to avoid or eliminate unneeded cost or suboptimal resources?
AWS Well-Architected Framework question
Have you selected the appropriate pricing model to meet your cost targets?
How CloudHealth helps
CloudHealth Reservation Management solutions allow you to model, optimize, and analyze Reserved Instance usage and purchases in your environment. The Cost Savings Report visualizes cost saving opportunities.
But what does this mean for you and your customers?
It’s easy to say you want everyone to succeed, but we truly want to provide our MSP partners with the capabilities that can help them grow their cloud business. By using CloudHealth to best align your own and your customers’ infrastructure to the five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework you can feel confident that the architecture can scale with business requirements.
