AWS Well-Architected Framework
A set of design principles from Amazon Web Services for building reliable, secure, efficient and cost-effective workloads, organised into pillars. It is the vocabulary AWS uses to review an architecture, and the pillars are worth memorising as a list.
AI Practitioner focus
- The Framework is the best-practice body; AWS Well-Architected Tool is the service that records workload reviews, applies lenses, identifies high-risk issues, and tracks improvements.
- Review AI workloads across all six pillars, including security/privacy, inference reliability, cost per interaction, performance/latency, operations, and sustainability.
- A Lens is a set of additional, expert-authored questions and best practices layered on top of the six pillars for a specific technology domain or industry (e.g. Serverless Lens, Machine Learning Lens, SaaS Lens) — the Well-Architected Tool’s Lens Catalog is where these are browsed and applied to a workload review, and you can also author a custom lens for organisation-specific guidance.
Key points
- Operational excellence — run and monitor systems to deliver business value, and keep improving processes and procedures. Named design principles: perform operations as code, make frequent small reversible changes, refine operations procedures frequently, and learn from all operational failures.
- Security — protect data, systems and assets. Includes incident response and infrastructure protection, and rests on the least privilege principle — grant only the access a task requires, nothing more.
- Reliability — recover from disruption, acquire capacity dynamically, and mitigate disruption automatically. Testing recovery procedures is an explicit practice here rather than an assumption.
- Performance efficiency — use computing resources efficiently and keep using them efficiently as demand and technologies change.
- Cost optimization — avoid unnecessary cost, and understand where money is going. See AWS Pricing and Billing and AWS Cost Explorer.
- Sustainability — minimize the environmental impact of running cloud workloads. This was added later, which is why some study material lists five pillars and newer material lists six; expect six.
- The framework is the body of review guidance, not the review service. AWS Well-Architected Tool records workload reviews and improvement plans; AWS Trusted Advisor checks a live account for service recommendations, and AWS Compute Optimizer supplies rightsizing evidence.
- Design ideas that recur across the pillars: loose coupling, elasticity and rightsizing, all defined in Cloud Computing Concepts.