The 5 Pillars Overview

The well architected framework is based on five pillars:

• Operational Excellence
• Security
• Cost Optimisation
• Reliability
• Performance Efficiency

Game Days

• Setting up and testing your response processes
• Standing up your prod architecture and attacking it for the purposes of breaking it

Pillar 1: Operational Excellence

Does our application work? Will our application continue to work?

• Operations as code
• Documentation is updated automatically
• Small changes (with rollback plans)
• Tighten feedback loops (iterate)
• Expect failure (red team, game days)
• Learn from failures and successes

Pillar 2: Security

Does it do what we want? (And only that?)

• Identities have the least priveledges possible
• Who who did what and when?
• Automate security tasks
• Encrypt data at transit and at rest
• Prepare for the worst (woven into game days)

Pillar 3: Cost Optimisation

Spend only what you have to

• Consumption based pricing
• Measure efficiency constantly
• Let AWS do the work when necessary
• Ties closely to operational performance

Pillar 4: Reliability

Is what you built going to work consistently?

• Recover from issues automatically
• Scale horizontally (where possible)
• Reduce idle resources (operational burden, attack surface increase)
• Manage change through automation

Pillar 5: Performance Efficiency

• Let AWS do the work (when possible)
• Reduce latency through regions & AWS edge
• Serverless > Containers > Instances