Six Pillars of Well-Architected Framework

1. Operational Excellence Pillar

This pillar focuses on the ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value, and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures.

• Core Focus: Automating operations, responding to events, and managing systems effectively.
• Key Topics:
  • Preparing for operations by defining requirements and designing for them.
  • Operating workloads effectively through monitoring, event management, and runbooks.
  • Evolving operations by learning from events and continuously improving.
  • Best Practices: Performing operations as code, making frequent and small reversible changes, and learning from all operational failures.

2. Security Pillar

This pillar focuses on the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies.

• Core Focus: Confidentiality and integrity of data, managing user permissions, and establishing controls to detect security events.
• Key Topics:
  • Identity and Access Management (IAM).
  • Detective controls for identifying potential threats.
  • Infrastructure protection using a defense-in-depth approach.
  • Data protection for data at rest and in transit.
  • Incident response planning and execution.
• Best Practices: Implementing a strong identity foundation, enabling traceability, applying security at all layers, and automating security best practices.

3. Reliability Pillar

This pillar focuses on the ability of a workload to perform its intended function correctly and consistently. This includes the ability to operate and test the workload through its total lifecycle.

• Core Focus: Designing for resilience and ensuring systems can automatically recover from failure.
• Key Topics:
  • Foundations, such as networking and compute, to avoid single points of failure.
  • Change management to control and automate changes.
  • Failure management to anticipate, detect, and respond to failures.
  • Disaster Recovery (DR) planning.
• Best Practices: Testing recovery procedures, automatically recovering from failure, and scaling horizontally to increase aggregate workload availability.

4. Performance Efficiency Pillar

This pillar focuses on the ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.

• Core Focus: Selecting the right resource types and sizes based on workload requirements, monitoring performance, and making decisions to maintain efficiency as business needs evolve.
• Key Topics:
  • Selection of the right instance types, storage, and database solutions.
  • Reviewing and optimizing architectures as new services become available.
  • Monitoring performance to identify and remediate bottlenecks.
  • Trade-offs between consistency, durability, and performance.
• Best Practices: Experimenting more often, using serverless architectures, and going global in minutes.

5. Cost Optimization Pillar

This pillar focuses on the ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point.

• Core Focus: Understanding and controlling where money is being spent, selecting the most appropriate and cost-effective resources, and scaling to meet business needs without overspending.
• Key Topics:
  • Practice Cloud Financial Management.
  • Expenditure and usage awareness.
  • Cost-effective resource selection.
  • Managing demand and supply of resources.
  • Optimizing over time by adopting new services.
• Best Practices: Adopting a consumption model, measuring overall efficiency, and analyzing and attributing expenditure.

6. Sustainability Pillar

This pillar focuses on minimizing the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads.

• Core Focus: Improving efficiency and reducing waste across all components of a workload by adopting best practices and measuring the environmental impact.
• Key Topics:
  • Understanding the impact of your workload.
  • Establishing sustainability goals.
  • Maximizing utilization of provisioned resources.
  • Anticipating and adopting new, more efficient hardware and software offerings.
  • Using managed services to minimize your environmental footprint.
• Best Practices: Focus on maximizing utilization, adopting efficient new technologies, and leveraging managed services to benefit from AWS's scale.