SOLUTION BRIEF Align with the AWS Well-Architected Framework with VMware Aria Cost

What is the AWS Well-Architected Framework?

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Well-Architected Framework outlines key concepts, design principles, and architectural best practices for building and running workloads in the cloud. Built upon years of experience designing and reviewing thousands of customers’ cloud architectures, the AWS WellArchitected Framework helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads. It also provides a consistent approach for customers and partners to evaluate and improve architectures.

The framework consists of six pillars, and each pillar is qualified by a set of foundational questions that allow you to understand if a specific architecture aligns well with cloud best practices.

The Six Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework

1. Operational Excellence

This covers how your organization supports your business objectives, as well as your ability to run workloads effectively, gain insight into their operations, and continuously improve supporting processes and procedures to deliver business value.

Key topics: 

• Understanding organizational priorities and structure
• Preparing for operational excellence
• Identifying when organizational and business outcomes might become at risk
• Evolving through a continuous cycle of improvement over time
   

2. Security

This covers how to take advantage of cloud technologies to protect data, systems and assets in a way that can improve your security posture.

Key topics: 

• Ensuring the right people have access to the right resources under the right conditions
• Detecting unexpected or unwanted configuration changes in addition to detecting unexpected behavior
• Protecting the systems and services within your workload against unintended and unauthorized access as well as potential vulnerabilities
• Classifying and encrypting data to prevent mishandling and comply with regulatory obligations
• Implementing mechanisms to respond to and mitigate the potential impact of security incidents
   

3. Reliability

This covers the ability of a workload to perform its intended function correctly and consistently when it’s expected to, including the ability to operate and test the workload through its total lifecycle.

Key topics:

• Putting in place foundation requirements before architecting a system
• Designing decisions upfront for both software and infrastructure
• Anticipating and accommodating changes to your workload
• Ensuring the people designing, implementing and operating your workloads are aware of business objectives and necessary reliability goals
   

4. Performance Efficiency

This covers the efficient use of computing resources to meet requirements and maintaining that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.

Key topics: 

• Using multiple solutions and enabling different features to improve performance
• Implementing a performance review process that considers all aspects of your services, and evolving this review over time
• Monitoring performance so you can remediate issues before they have negative impacts
• Thinking about trade-offs to ensure an optimal approach 
   

5. Cost Optimization

This covers the continual process of refining and improving over the span of a workload’s lifecycle to achieve business outcomes while minimizing costs, allowing your organization to maximize its return on investment.

Key topics:

• Practicing cloud financial management to enable your organization to realize business value and financial success as you optimize cost and usage, and scale on AWS
• Understanding how profitable organizational units and products are so you can make informed decisions about where to allocate resources
• Using the appropriate services, resources and configurations for your workloads
• Managing demand and appropriately supplying resources
• Optimizing by reviewing new services and implementing them in your workload
   

6. Sustainability

This covers the ability to continually improve sustainability impacts by reducing energy consumption and increasing efficiency across all components of a workload by maximizing the benefits from the provisioned resources and minimizing total resources required.

Key topics:

• Understanding improvements such as eliminating waste and maximizing the value of the resources you consume
• Adding sustainability to your list of business requirements and meeting sustainability targets
• Recognizing patterns and opportunities for employing best practices in region selection, user behavior, software and architecture, data, hardware, and your development and deployment process
   

General Design Principles of the AWS Well-Architected Framework

Architecting technology solutions that align with the six pillars of the framework ensures your business requirements are met as efficiently as possible with a secure and reliable infrastructure. AWS recommends following these general design principles:

AWS recommends following these general design principles:

• Stop guessing your capacity needs.
• Test systems at production scale.
• Automate to make architectural experimentation easier.
• Allow for evolutionary architectures.
• Drive architectures using data.
• Improve through game days (i.e. simulations of production).
   

How to align to the AWS Well-Architected Framework with VMware Aria Cost

VMware Aria Cost™ powered by CloudHealth® can help cloud consumers and managed service providers who are building and running workloads in the cloud answer several questions that qualify each pillar in the AWS Well-Architected Framework. VMware Aria Cost provides full alignment with the cost optimization pillar.

1. Operational Excellence

2. Security

3. Reliability

4. Performance Efficiency

5. Cost Optimization

6. Sustainability

Learn More

For partners seeking guidance on how to build VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth into your service offerings, visit cloudhealth.vmware.com or contact your channel account manager.
 

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