At Sakura Sky, we are committed to helping our customers build and maintain robust, efficient, and secure cloud infrastructures. Our team of experts is well-versed in AWS services and best practices and one of the ways we help our customers achieve operational excellence is by offering AWS Well-Architected assessments.

So what is AWS Well-Architected, why is it essential for organizations, and how can our team can assist you in optimizing your cloud infrastructure?

What is AWS Well-Architected?

AWS Well-Architected is a framework designed by AWS to help organizations build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient cloud infrastructures.

The framework consists of five pillars:

1. Operational Excellence: This pillar focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business value and continually improving processes and procedures. It involves applying best practices for infrastructure management, change management, and deployment to ensure your systems are reliable, efficient, and can adapt to changing requirements.
2. Security: The security pillar ensures that data is protected, and systems are secure and compliant with industry standards. It emphasizes implementing strong identity and access management, data encryption, network security, and maintaining continuous monitoring and incident response processes
3. Reliability: This pillar maintains the ability to recover from infrastructure or service failures and scale on demand. Reliability involves designing for failure, implementing fault-tolerant architectures, and maintaining backup and disaster recovery strategies to minimize downtime and ensure business continuity.
4. Performance Efficiency: The performance efficiency pillar utilizes computing resources efficiently and selects the right resource types and sizes based on workload requirements. It involves continuously reviewing and optimizing your infrastructure, taking advantage of services like auto-scaling, caching, and monitoring tools to deliver optimal performance.
5. Cost Optimization: This pillar aims to achieve the lowest price point while meeting business requirements. Cost optimization involves managing and controlling cloud spending, selecting the most cost-effective resources, and continuously monitoring and analyzing usage patterns to identify opportunities for cost savings.

Why You Should Use AWS Well-Architected

Your team should look at adopting the AWS Well-Architected framework the enable your organization to:

• Improve and optimize cloud infrastructure for better performance, security, and cost-efficiency.
• Identify and address potential issues before they impact critical systems.
• Enhance reliability and ensure that systems can scale as needed.
• Implement industry best practices and maintain compliance with relevant standards.

What We Do in a Well-Architected Assessment

As part of our Cloud services offering, we perform detailed implementation reviews including a comparison of your environment against the AWS Well-Architected framework.

During a Well-Architected assessment, our team will:

1. Review your existing AWS infrastructure to evaluate its adherence to the five pillars of the Well-Architected framework.
2. Identify areas of improvement and provide recommendations to optimize performance, security, reliability, and cost.
3. Work closely with your team to understand your specific requirements and provide tailored guidance for implementing the recommended changes.

How We Approach a Review

Our approach to a AWS Well-Architected review includes:

1. Discovery: We begin by understanding your business goals, requirements, and current infrastructure.
2. Assessment: We conduct a thorough assessment of your AWS environment, focusing on the five pillars of the Well-Architected framework.
3. Recommendations: We provide a detailed report with specific recommendations for improvements, aligned with your business objectives.
4. Implementation Support: We offer guidance and assistance in implementing the recommended changes, ensuring a seamless transition to an optimized infrastructure.
5. Ongoing Optimization: Our team remains available for ongoing support, helping you maintain a high-performing, secure, and cost-efficient AWS environment.

Tooling

AWS provides a tool called the AWS Well-Architected Tool, which is designed to help organizations analyze and improve their workloads based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The tool helps users identify critical issues and areas for improvement, in line with the five pillars of the framework. It provides a comprehensive set of questions and best practices, enabling users to evaluate their architectures and identify areas where improvements can be made.

Using the AWS Well-Architected Tool, plus others such as Steampipe, our team can:

• Create and define a new workload or select an existing one for analysis.
• Answer a series of questions related to the five pillars of the framework, providing a detailed understanding of your current architecture.
• Generate a report that highlights potential risks, issues, and areas for improvement, along with recommendations for addressing them.
• Track the progress of your improvements over time, ensuring continuous optimization and adherence to best practices.

The AWS Well-Architected Tool provides valuable insights and guidance, allowing our team to efficiently identify and address any areas where your cloud infrastructure can be optimized or improved.

By incorporating such tools into our Well-Architected assessments, we can further enhance the overall quality and effectiveness of our recommendations.

Learn More

Our team of professionals has extensive experience working with AWS services, ensuring that your cloud infrastructure meets the highest standards of performance, reliability, and security. Our team of AWS architects and engineers possess deep knowledge of AWS best practices and a strong track record of success in optimizing and securing cloud environments for our customers.

AWS Well-Architected assessments are essential for organizations looking to optimize their cloud infrastructure and adopt industry best practices.

Contact us to learn more.