All posts by Haleh Najafzadeh

Announcing updates to the AWS Well-Architected Framework guidance

Post Syndicated from Haleh Najafzadeh original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/announcing-updates-to-the-aws-well-architected-framework-guidance/

We are excited to announce the availability of improved AWS Well-Architected Framework guidance. In this update, we have made changes across all six pillars of the framework: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability.

In this release, we have made the implementation guidance for the new and updated best practices more prescriptive, including enhanced recommendations and steps on reusable architecture patterns targeting specific business outcomes in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

A brief history

The Well-Architected Framework is a collection of best practices that allow customers to evaluate and improve the design, implementation, and operations of their workloads in the cloud.

In 2012, the first version of the framework was published, leading to the 2015 release of the guidance whitepaper. We added the Operational Excellence pillar in 2016. The pillar-specific whitepapers and AWS Well-Architected Lenses were released in 2017, and the following year, the AWS Well-Architected Tool was launched.

In 2020, Well-Architected Framework guidance had a new release, along with more lenses, as well as API integration with the AWS Well-Architected Tool. The sixth pillar, Sustainability, was added in 2021. In 2022, dedicated pages were introduced for each consolidated best practice across all six pillars, with several best practices updated with improved prescriptive guidance. By April 2023, more than 50% of the Framework’s best practices have had their prescriptive guidance improved.

A brief history of the AWS Well-Architected Framework

A brief history of the AWS Well-Architected Framework

What’s new

As customers mature in their journey, they are seeking guidance to achieve accurate solutions that is prescriptive to their business, environments, and workloads. AWS Well-Architected is committed to providing such information to customers by continually evolving and updating our guidance.

The content updates and improvements in this release focus on having more complete coverage across the AWS service portfolio, helping customers make more informed decisions when developing implementation plans. Services that were added or expanded in coverage include: AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Resilience Hub, AWS Config, AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Organizations, AWS Control Tower, AWS Compute Optimizer, AWS Budgets, Amazon CodeWhisperer, Amazon CodeGuru, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Simple Notification Service, AWS Systems Manager, Amazon ElastiCache, and AWS Global Accelerator.

Pillar updates

Operational Excellence

The Operational Excellence Pillar has received updates to two of the five Design Principles and has a new Design Principle on observability, which highlights its importance and relevance throughout the pillar content. All 10 best practices in OPS05 have been updated, and we have consolidated 28 best practices into 16, across four questions (OPS04, OPS06, OPS08, and OPS09), as well as improving prescriptive guidance.

Security

In the Security Pillar, the Incident response in SEC10 underwent an update to align with the AWS Security Incident Response Guide, while introducing one new best practice, and improving the prescriptive guidance for others. Two best practices in SEC08 and SEC09 have received improved prescriptive guidance on securing workloads at rest and in transit.

Reliability

The Reliability Pillar has received prescriptive guidance improvements to one best practice in REL06, and six best practices in REL11, focused on how to best monitor, failover, remediate, and limit impacts of failures. The update addresses a wide variety of managed services and designs, including multi-Region-based resilience.

Performance Efficiency

The Performance Efficiency Pillar has been completely restructured, consolidating and merging guidance to reduce the number of best practices by 10 and the number of questions by three. We have added best practices around efficient caching and optimizing hardware acceleration. We have also improved the implementation guidance in all 32 best practices of the newly restructured Pillar.

Cost Optimization

The Cost Optimization Pillar has 10 best practices with improved implementation prescriptive guidance.

Sustainability

The Sustainability Pillar has received updates to the risk levels of seven best practices.

Conclusion

This Well-Architected release includes updates and improvements to 90 best practices: Operational Excellence (26), Security (8), Reliability (7), Performance Efficiency (32), Cost Optimization (10), and Sustainability (7). These changes are in addition to the 151 improved best practices released in 2023 (127 in April 10, 2023; and 24 in July 13, 2023), resulting in more than 73% of the existing Framework best practices updated at least once in the last year.

As of this release, 100% of Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability; 63% of Operational Excellence; 60% of Security; and 50% of Reliability Pillar content have been refreshed at least once since October 2022.

The content is available in 11 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.

Updates in this release are also available in the AWS Well-Architected Tool, which can be used to review your workloads, address important design considerations, and help ensure that you follow the best practices and guidance of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Ready to get started? Review the updated AWS Well-Architected Framework Pillar best practices, as well as pillar-specific whitepapers.

Have questions about some of the new best practices or most recent updates? Join our growing community on AWS re:Post.

Announcing updates to the AWS Well-Architected Framework

Post Syndicated from Haleh Najafzadeh original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/announcing-updates-to-the-aws-well-architected-framework-2/

We are excited to announce the availability of improved AWS Well-Architected Framework guidance. In this update, we have made changes across all six pillars of the framework: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability.

A brief history

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a collection of best practices that allow customers to evaluate and improve the design, implementation, and operations of their workloads in the cloud.

In 2012, the first version of the framework was published, leading to the 2015 release of the guidance whitepaper. We added the operational excellence pillar in 2016. The pillar-specific whitepapers and AWS Well-Architected Lenses were released in 2017, and, the following year, the AWS Well-Architected Tool was launched.

In 2020, the content for the Well-Architected Framework received a major update, as well as more lenses, and API integration with the AWS Well-Architected Tool. The sixth pillar, Sustainability, was added in 2021. In 2022, dedicated pages were introduced for each consolidated best practice across all six pillars, with several best practices updated with improved prescriptive guidance.

AWS Well-Architected timeline

AWS Well-Architected timeline

What’s new

Well-Architected Framework content is consistently updated and improved in order to adapt to the constantly changing and innovating AWS environment, with new and evolved emerging services and technologies. This ensures cloud architects can build and operate secure, high-performing, resilient, efficient, and sustainable systems in the AWS Cloud.

The content updates and improvements in this release focus on providing more complete coverage across the AWS service portfolio to help customers make more informed decisions when developing implementation plans. Services that were added or expanded in coverage include: AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Resilience Hub, AWS Config, AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Organizations, AWS Control Tower, AWS Compute Optimizer, AWS Budgets, Amazon CodeWhisperer, and Amazon CodeGuru.

Pillar updates

The Operational Excellence Pillar has a new best practice on enabling support plans for production workloads. This Pillar also has a major update on defining a customer communication plan for outages.

In the Security Pillar, we added a new best practice area, Application Security (AppSec). AppSec is complete with eight new best practices to guide customers as they develop, test, and release software, providing guidance on how to consider the tools, testing, and organizational approach used to develop software.

The Reliability Pillar has a new best practice on architecting workloads to meet availability targets and uptime service-level agreements (SLAs). We also added the resilience shared responsibility model to its introduction section.

The Cost Optimization Pillar has new best practices on automating operations as a part of cost-optimization efforts and enforcing data-retention policies.

In the Sustainability Pillar, we introduced a clear process for selecting Regions, as well as tools for right-sizing services and improving the overall utilization of resources in the AWS Cloud.

Best practice updates

The implementation guidance and best practices have been updated in this release to be more prescriptive, including enhanced recommendations and steps on reusable architecture patterns targeting specific business outcomes in the AWS Cloud.

As many as 113 best practices are updated with more prescriptive guidance in Operational Excellence (22), Security (18), Reliability (14), Performance Efficiency (10), Cost Optimization (22), and Sustainability (27). Fourteen new best practices have been introduced in Operational Excellence (1), Security (9), Reliability (1), Cost Optimization (2), and Sustainability (1).

From a total of 127 new/updated best practices, 78% include explicit implementation steps as part of making them more prescriptive. The remaining 22% have been updated by improving their existing implementation steps. These changes are in addition to the 51 improved best practices released in 2022 (18 in Q3 2022, and 33 in Q4 2022), resulting in more than 50% of the existing Framework best practices having been updated recently.

The content is available in 11 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.

Here is the list of best practices that are new or updated in this release:

  • Operational Excellence: OPS01-BP03, OPS01-BP04, OPS02-BP01, OPS02-BP06, OPS02-BP07, OPS03-BP04, OPS03-BP05, OPS04-BP01, OPS04-BP03, OPS04-BP04, OPS04-BP05, OPS05-BP02, OPS05-BP06, OPS05-BP07, OPS07-BP01, OPS07-BP05, OPS07-BP06, OPS08-BP02, OPS08-BP03, OPS08-BP04, OPS10-BP05, OPS11-BP01, OPS11-BP04
  • Security: SEC01-BP01, SEC01-BP02, SEC01-BP07, SEC02-BP01, SEC02-BP02, SEC02-BP03, SEC02-BP05, SEC03-BP02, SEC03-BP04, SEC03-BP07, SEC03-BP09, SEC04-BP01, SEC05-BP01, SEC06-BP01, SEC07-BP01, SEC08-BP04, SEC08-BP02, SEC09-BP02, SEC03-BP08, SEC11-BP01, SEC11-BP02, SEC11-BP03, SEC11-BP04, SEC11-BP05, SEC11-BP06, SEC11-BP07, SEC11-BP08
  • Reliability: REL01-BP01, REL01-BP02, REL01-BP03, REL01-BP04, REL01-BP06, REL02-BP01, REL09-BP01, REL09-BP02, REL09-BP03, REL09-BP04, REL10_BP04, REL10-BP03, REL11-BP07, REL13-BP02, REL13-BP03
  • Performance Efficiency: PERF02-BP06, PERF05_BP03, PERF05-BP02, PERF05-BP04, PERF05-BP05, PERF05-BP06, PERF05-BP07, PFRF04-BP04, PERF02_BP04, PERF02_BP05
  • Cost Optimization: COST02_BP01, COST02_BP02, COST02_BP03, COST02_BP05, COST03_BP02, COST03_BP04, COST03_BP05, COST04_BP01, COST04_BP02, COST04_BP03, COST04_BP04, COST04_BP05, COST05_BP03, COST05_BP05, COST05_BP06, COST06_BP01, COST06_BP03, COST07_BP01, COST07_BP02, COST07_BP05, COST09_BP03, COST10_BP01, COST10_BP02, COST11_BP01
  • Sustainability: SUS01_BP01, SUS02_BP01, SUS02_BP02, SUS02_BP03, SUS02_BP04, SUS02_BP05, SUS02_BP06, SUS03_BP01, SUS03_BP02, SUS03_BP03, SUS03_BP04, SUS03_BP05, SUS04_BP01, SUS04_BP02, SUS04_BP03, SUS04_BP04, SUS04_BP05, SUS04_BP06, SUS04_BP07, SUS04_BP08, SUS05_BP01, SUS05_BP02, SUS05_BP03, SUS05_BP04, SUS06_BP01, SUS06_BP02, SUS06_BP03, SUS06_BP04

Updates in this release are also available in the AWS Well-Architected Tool, which can be used to review your workloads, address important design considerations, and help ensure that you follow the best practices and guidance of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Ready to get started? Review the updated AWS Well-Architected Framework Pillar best practices, as well as pillar-specific whitepapers.

Have questions about some of the new best practices or most recent updates? Join our growing community on AWS re:Post.

Announcing updates to the AWS Well-Architected Framework

Post Syndicated from Haleh Najafzadeh original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/announcing-updates-to-the-aws-well-architected-framework/

We are excited to announce the availability of improved AWS Well-Architected Framework content. In this update, we have made changes across all six pillars of the framework: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability.

A brief history

The Well-Architected Framework is a collection of best practices that allow customers to evaluate and improve the design, implementation, and operations of their workloads and organizations in the cloud.

In 2012, the first version of the framework was published, leading to the 2015 release of the guidance whitepaper. We added the operational excellence pillar in 2016. The pillar-specific whitepapers and AWS Well-Architected Lenses were released in 2017, and, the following year, the AWS Well-Architected Tool was launched. In 2020, the content for the framework received a major update, more lenses, and API integration with the Well-Architected Tool. The sixth pillar, sustainability, was added in late 2021.

W-A timeline v2

AWS Well-Architected timeline

What’s new

Updates to the Well-Architected content include:

Learn, measure, improve, and iterate

Best practices include regularly reviewing your workloads—even those that have not had major changes. We encourage you to assess your existing workloads as your architecture evolves or business needs change, and create milestones for your workloads as they develop. Use the Well-Architected Framework to guide your design and architecture of new workloads, or of workloads that you are planning on moving to the cloud.

Taking best practices into account early in your process can yield high success rates. In effective organizations, each best practice is considered and prioritized with respect to the goal they are trying to achieve.

AWS Well-Architected helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for a variety of applications and workloads. The Framework is built around six pillars—operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.

Want to partner with us? Sign up!
Want to work with us? Visit Amazon Careers and search for “AWS Well-Architected” to find opportunities.

Introducing the new AWS Well-Architected Machine Learning Lens

Post Syndicated from Haleh Najafzadeh original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/introducing-the-new-aws-well-architected-machine-learning-lens/

The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides you with a formal approach to compare your workloads against best practices. It also includes guidance on how to make improvements.

Machine learning (ML) algorithms discover and learn patterns in data, and construct mathematical models to predict future data. These solutions can revolutionize lives through better diagnoses of diseases, environmental protections, products and services transformation, and more.

Your ML models depend on the quality of input data to generate accurate results. As data changes over time, monitoring is required to continuously detect, correct, and mitigate issues. This improves accuracy and performance. It also may require you to retrain your model with the latest refined data.

Application workloads rely on step-by-step instructions to solve a problem. ML workloads enable algorithms to learn from data through an iterative and continuous cycle. We are announcing a brand-new version of the AWS Well-Architected Machine Learning Lens whitepaper. It complements and builds upon the Well-Architected Framework to address this difference between these two types of workloads.

The whitepaper provides you with a set of established cloud and technology agnostic best practices. You can apply this guidance and architectural principles when designing your ML workloads, or after your workloads have entered production as part of continuous improvement. The paper includes guidance and resources to help you implement these best practices on AWS.

The Well-Architected Machine Learning Lens components

The Lens includes four focus areas:

1. The Well-Architected Machine Learning Design Principles — A set of considerations that are used as the basis for a Well-Architected ML workload. These design principles are the guiding light for the collection of the best practices in the ML Lens.

2. The Well-Architected Machine Learning Lifecycle — This integrates the Well-Architected Framework into the Machine Learning Lifecycle as can be seen in figure 1.

    • The Well-Architected Framework pillars includes:
      1. Operational Excellence
      2. Security
      3. Reliability
      4. Performance Efficiency
      5. Cost Optimization
    • The Machine Learning Lifecycle phases referenced in the ML Lens include:
      1. Business goal identification
      2. ML problem framing
      3. Data processing (data collection, data pre-processing, feature engineering)
      4. Model development (training, tuning, evaluation)
      5. Model deployment (prediction, inference)
      6. Model monitoring
Figure 1. Well-Architected Machine Learning Lifecycle

Figure 1. Well-Architected Machine Learning Lifecycle

In the Well-Architected ML Lens whitepaper, the Well-Architected Machine Learning Lifecycle applies the Well-Architected Framework pillars to each of the lifecycle phases.

3. Cloud and technology agnostic best practices — These are best practices for each ML lifecycle phase across the Well-Architected Framework pillars. Best practices are accompanied by:

    • Implementation guidance that provides AWS implementation plans for each best practice with references to AWS technologies and resources.
    • Resources as a set of links to AWS documents, blogs, videos, and code examples as supporting resources to the best practices and their implementation plans.

4. ML Lifecycle architecture diagrams — These illustrate processes, technologies, and components that support many of the best practices, shown in Figure 2. They include: Feature stores, Model Registry, lineage tracker, alarm manager, scheduler, and more. Different pipeline technologies are illustrated using these architecture diagrams.

Figure 2. Machine Learning Lifecycle phases with expanded components

Figure 2. Machine Learning Lifecycle phases with expanded components

Where should you apply the Well-Architected Machine Learning Lens?

Use the Well-Architected ML Lens to:

  • Make informed decisions — Plan early and make informed decisions by reviewing best practices before a new workload design begins.
  • Build and deploy faster — Use the best practices to guide you through building new Well-Architected workloads across the ML lifecycle.
  • Lower or mitigate risks — Evaluate existing workloads regularly to identify, mitigate, and address potential issues early.
  • Learn AWS best practices — Use the provided implementation plans as guidance on implementing the best practices on AWS.

Conclusion

The new Well-Architected Machine Learning Lens whitepaper is available now. Use the Lens to help ensure that your ML workloads are architected with operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization in mind.

Special thanks to everyone across the AWS Solution Architecture and Machine Learning communities.  These contributions encompassed diverse perspectives, expertise, and experiences in developing the new AWS Well-Architected Machine Learning Lens.