Tag Archives: Top 5

Top 5: Featured Architecture Content from December 2021

Post Syndicated from Ellen Crowley original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/top-5-featured-architecture-content-from-december-2021/

The AWS Architecture Center provides new and notable reference architecture diagrams, vetted architecture solutions, AWS Well-Architected best practices, whitepapers, and more. This blog post features some of our best picks from December’s new and updated content.

1.  Sustainability Pillar – AWS Well-Architected Framework

This new pillar in the Well-Architected framework helps organizations learn, measure, and improve their workloads using environmental best practices for cloud computing. Did you know that the shared responsibility model also applies to sustainability? You can use the pillar to track your progress against best practices to support sustainability. Your development teams can also use this new pillar and Well-Architected best practices to support many sustainability use cases. These can include reducing the energy or resources required to run workloads and anticipate and adopt new and more efficient technology offerings.

2.  Retail Customer Service Contact Center

Increasingly, customers expect to be able to ask questions and get assistance quickly and through various channels. The companies that embrace this the fastest see increases in customer engagement and satisfaction. This reference architecture shows physical and ecommerce retailers how to build a next generation customer contact center. It aims to simplify and transform their customer service channels with natural language processing and automation.

Retail Customer Service Reference Architecture Diagram

Retail Customer Service Contact Center Reference Architecture Diagram

3.  Establishing Your Cloud Foundation on AWS

When planning a cloud adoption strategy you are often faced with a number of complex decisions to stand up and scale a production-ready cloud environment. This whitepaper guides you through building and evolving your AWS Cloud environment based on a set of definitions, use cases, guidance, and automations.

4.  Hybrid Networking Lens of the Well-Architected Framework

This new lens is intended for those in technology roles, such as chief technology officers (CTOs), architects, developers, and operations team members. It provides AWS best practices and strategies to use when designing hybrid networking architectures. If you’re looking to build hybrid networking architectures to integrate your on-premises data center and AWS operations to support a broad spectrum of use cases, this lens will help set you up for success. It outlines three areas to consider when designing hybrid network connectivity for your workload: data layer, monitoring and configuration management, and security.

5.  AWS Virtual Waiting Room

This Solutions Implementation helps buffer incoming user requests to your website during large bursts of traffic. It creates a cloud infrastructure designed to temporarily offload incoming traffic to your website, and it provides options to customize and integrate a virtual waiting room. The waiting room acts as a holding area for visitors to your website and allows traffic to pass through when there is enough capacity.

Looking for more new and updated content from this year? Check out the other posts in the Top 5 series!

Looking for more architecture content? AWS Architecture Center provides reference architecture diagrams, vetted architecture solutions, Well-Architected best practices, patterns, icons, and more!

Top 5 Architecture Blog Posts for Q4 2021

Post Syndicated from Bonnie McClure original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/top-5-architecture-blog-posts-for-q4-2021/

The goal of the AWS Architecture Blog is to highlight best practices and provide architectural guidance. We publish thought leadership and how to pieces that encourage readers to discover other technical documentation such as solutions and managed solutions, other AWS blogs, videos, reference architectures, whitepapers, and guides, training and certification, case studies, and the AWS Architecture Monthly Magazine. We welcome your contributions!

A big thank you to you, our readers, for spending time on our blog this past quarter. Of course, we wouldn’t have content for you to read without our hard-working writers either, so thank you to them as well!

Without further ado, the following five posts were the top Architecture Blog posts published in Q4 (October through December 2021).

#5: Disaster Recovery with AWS Managed Services, Part I: Single Region

by Dhruv Bakshi and Brent Kim

This 3-part blog series discusses disaster recovery (DR) strategies that you can implement to ensure your data is safe and that your workload stays available during a disaster. Part I discusses the single AWS Region/multi-Availability Zone (AZ) DR strategy.

Figure 1. Single Region/multi-AZ with secondary Region for backups

Single Region/multi-AZ with secondary Region for backups

#4: Exploring Data Transfer Costs for AWS Managed Databases

by Dennis Schmidt, Sebastian Gorczynski, and Birender Pal

When selecting managed database services in AWS, it’s important to understand how data transfer charges are calculated – whether it’s relational, key-value, document, in-memory, graph, time series, wide column, or ledger.

This blog outlines the data transfer charges for several AWS managed database offerings to help you choose the most cost-effective setup for your workload.

Figure-7.-Amazon-DocumentDB-data-transfer

Amazon DocumentDB data transfer

#3: Simplifying Multi-account CI/CD Deployments using AWS Proton

by Marvin Fernandes and Abi Betancourt

This blog shows you how to simplify multi-account deployments in an environment that is segregated between platform and development teams. It shows you how you can use one consistent and standardized continuous delivery pipeline with AWS Proton.

Figure 4. AWS Proton deploys service into multi-account environment through standardized continuous delivery pipeline

AWS Proton deploys service into multi-account environment through standardized continuous delivery pipeline

#2: Serverless Architecture for a Structured Data Mining Solution

by Uri Rotem

This post shows a pipeline of services, built on top of a serverless architecture that locate, collect, and unify data. This architecture supports large-scale datasets. Because it is a serverless solution, it is also secure and cost effective.

Figure 8. Architecture diagram of entire data collection and classification process

Architecture diagram of entire data collection and classification process

#1: Introducing the new AWS Well-Architected Machine Learning Lens

by Haleh Najafzadeh

This 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 machine learning 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.

Figure 2. Machine Learning Lifecycle phases with expanded components

Machine Learning Lifecycle phases with expanded components

Thank you!

Thanks again to all our readers and blog post writers! We look forward to continuing to learn and build amazing things together in 2022.

Other blog posts in this series

Top 5: Featured Architecture Content for October

Post Syndicated from Elyse Lopez original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/top-5-featured-architecture-content-for-october/

The AWS Architecture Center provides new and notable reference architecture diagrams, vetted architecture solutions, AWS Well-Architected best practices, whitepapers, and more. This blog post features some of our best picks from the new and newly updated content we released in the past month.

 1. AWS Security at the Edge

This new whitepaper provides the foundations for implementing a defense-in-depth security strategy at the edge. It addresses three areas:

  1. AWS services at AWS edge locations
  2. How those services can be used to implement the best practices outlined in the design principles of the Security Pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework
  3. The security aspects of additional AWS edge services that you can use to secure your edge environments or expand operations into new, previously unsupported environments

2. Machine Learning Lens for the AWS Well-Architected Framework 

Machine learning (ML) algorithms discover and learn patterns in data and construct mathematical models to enable predictions on future data. ML solutions can revolutionize lives through better diagnosis of diseases, environment protection, products and services transformation, and more.

This newly updated whitepaper provides you with established cloud- and technology-agnostic best practices. Apply these architectural principles when designing your ML workloads or after workloads have entered production as part of continuous improvement.

3. Streaming Media Lens for the AWS Well-Architected Framework 

In this newly published Lens, learn how Well-Architected best practices can help you design, deliver, and maintain streaming media workloads. The Lens defines components, explores common workload scenarios, and outlines design principles that help you apply the Well-Architected Framework. Dive deeper into how each scenario affects the architecture of your workload and evaluate the technology architecture that best meets your needs.

4. Maintaining Personalized Experiences with Machine Learning

Boost your customer engagement by providing up-to-date product recommendations, personalized product re-rankings, and customized direct marketing. This new Solutions Implementation helps you provide real-time, curated experiences across multiple channels using Amazon Personalize. The implementation automates the entire lifecycle of a personalization workload, presenting the results in an Amazon CloudWatch dashboard.

5. AWS QnABot

Alexa, what does a QnABot do? This new Solutions Implementation dives deep on AWS QnABot, a multi-channel, multi-language conversational interface (chatbot) that responds to customer’s questions, answers, and feedback. Learn how to deploy QnABot across channels such as chat, voice, SMS, and Amazon Alexa, implementing the newest ML technologies to enhance the customer experience and build more efficient communications.

Use the web user interface to ask: “What is Q and A bot?”. The answer now displays the heading, links, and emphasis specified in your markdown text.

Top 5 Architecture Blog Posts for Q3 2021

Post Syndicated from Bonnie McClure original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/top-5-architecture-blog-posts-for-q3-2021/

The goal of the AWS Architecture Blog is to highlight best practices and provide architectural guidance. We publish thought leadership pieces that encourage readers to discover other technical documentation such as solutions and managed solutions, other AWS blogs, videos, reference architectures, whitepapers, and guides, training and certification, case studies, and the AWS Architecture Monthly Magazine. We welcome your contributions!

Field Notes is a series of posts within the Architecture Blog that provides hands-on technical guidance from AWS Solutions Architects, consultants, and technical account managers based on their experiences in the field solving real-world business problems for customers.

A big thank you to you, our readers, for spending time on our blog this past quarter. Of course, we wouldn’t have content for you to read without our hard-working AWS Solutions Architects and other blog post writers either, so thank you to them as well! Without further ado, the following five posts were the top Architecture Blog and Field Notes blog posts published in Q3 (July through September 2021).

#5: Choosing Your VPC Endpoint Strategy for Amazon S3

by Jeff Harman and Gilles-Kuessan Satchivi

In this blog post, Jeff and Gilles-Kuessan guide you through selecting the right virtual private connection (VPC) endpoint type to access Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). A VPC endpoint allows workloads in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to connect to supported public AWS services or third-party applications over the AWS network.

#4: Using VPC Endpoints in Multi-Region Architectures with Route 53 Resolver

by Michael Haken

You want a straightforward way to use VPC endpoints and endpoint policies for all Regions uniformly and consistently. In this post, Michael shows you how Route 53 Resolver solves this challenge using DNS. This solution ensures that requests to AWS services that support VPC endpoints stay within the VPC network, regardless of their Region.

#3: Architecting a Highly Available, Serverless Microservices-Based Ecommerce Site

by Senthil Kumar and Ajit Puthiyavettle

The number of ecommerce vendors is growing globally, and these vendors often handle large traffic at different times of the day and on different days of the year. This, in addition to building, managing, and maintaining IT infrastructure on-premises data centers can present challenges to businesses’ scalability and growth. In this blog post, Senthil and Ajit provide you a Serverless on AWS solution that offloads the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing resources and ensures your business’ architecture can handle peak traffic.

#2: Data Caching Across Microservices in a Serverless Architecture

by Irfan Saleem, Pallavi Nargund, and Peter Buonora

In this blog post, Irfan, Pallavi, and Peter discuss a couple of customer use cases that use Serverless on AWS offerings to maintain a cache close to the microservices layer. This improves performance by reducing or eliminating the need for the real-time backend calls and by reducing latency and service-to-service communication.

#1: Overview of Data Transfer Charges for Common Architectures 

With over 35,000 views and rising, this post is vastly outpacing all other contenders this quarter. In this post, Birender, Sebastian, and Dennis discuss how data transfer charges are often overlooked while architecting solutions in AWS. This post will help you identify potential data transfer charges you may encounter while operating your workload on AWS.

Thank you!

Thanks again to all our readers and blog post writers! We look forward to continuing to learn and build amazing things together in 2021.

Other blog posts in this series

Top 5: Featured Architecture Content for September

Post Syndicated from Elyse Lopez original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/top-5-featured-architecture-content-for-september/

The AWS Architecture Center provides new and notable reference architecture diagrams, vetted architecture solutions, AWS Well-Architected best practices, whitepapers, and more. This blog post features some of our best picks from the new and newly updated content we released in the past month.

1. AWS Best Practices for DDoS Resiliency

Prioritizing the availability and responsiveness of your application helps you maintain customer trust. That’s why it’s crucial to protect your business from the impact of distributed denial of service (DDoS) and other cyberattacks. This whitepaper provides you prescriptive guidance to improve the resiliency of your applications and best practices for how to manage different attack types.

2. Predictive Modeling for Automotive Retail

Automotive retailers use data to better understand how their incentives are helping to sell cars. This new reference architecture diagram shows you how to design a modeling system that provides granular return on investment (ROI) predictions for automotive sales incentives.

3. AWS Graviton Performance Testing – Tips for Independent Software Vendors

If you’re deciding whether to phase in AWS Graviton processors for your workload, this whitepaper covers best practices and common pitfalls for defining test approaches to evaluate Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance performance and how to set success factors and compare different test methods and their implementation.

4. Text Analysis with Amazon OpenSearch Service and Amazon Comprehend

This AWS Solutions Implementation was recently updated with new guidance related to Amazon OpenSearch Service, the successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service. Learn how Amazon OpenSearch Service and Amazon Comprehend work together to deploy a cost-effective, end-to-end solution to extract meaningful insights from unstructured text-based data such as customer calls, support tickets, and online customer feedback.

5. Back to Basics: Hosting a Static Website on AWS

In this episode of Back to Basics, join SA Readiness Specialist Even Zhang as he breaks down the AWS services you can use to host and scale your static website without a single server. You’ll also learn how to use additional functionalities to enhance your observability and security posture or run A/B tests.

CloudFront Edge Locations and Caches from Back to Basics video

Figure 1. CloudFront Edge Locations and Caches from Back to Basics video

 

Top 5: Featured Architecture Content for August

Post Syndicated from Elyse Lopez original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/top-5-featured-architecture-content-for-august/

The AWS Architecture Center provides new and notable reference architecture diagrams, vetted architecture solutions, AWS Well-Architected best practices, whitepapers, and more. This blog post features some of our best picks from the new and newly updated content we released in the past month.

1. Implementing Travel & Hospitality Data Mesh

The travel and hospitality industries are facing new challenges when generating, accessing, and analyzing data at scale. This new reference architecture diagram shows how to implement a travel and hospitality-related data mesh that you can use to work with data such as travel reservations, loyalty programs, and digital revenue.

2. AWS Outposts High Availability Design and Architecture Considerations

This new whitepaper discusses architecture considerations and recommended practices that systems architects and IT managers can apply to build highly available on-premises application environments with AWS Outposts.

3. Using Computer Vision for Product Quality Analysis in Plants

This reference architecture is designed for manufacturers that want to enhance their Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure by using computer vision for product quality analysis. It shows how to detect and act on product defect classification using AWS IoT and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) services.

4. Tamper Proof Quality Data Using Amazon QLDB

Data tampering is costly for manufacturing companies, and quality data can be particularly vulnerable. This new AWS Solutions Implementation protects quality data by using cryptographic hashing in Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB) to maintain an accurate history of data changes.

5. Back to Basics: Handling Communications Between Applications

Many developers are realizing the benefits of moving from centralized to distributed architectures. Because of this, information on how to establish communication between the application services in those environments is very popular. This episode of Back to Basics covers best practices to establish communication, including trade-offs, common anti-patterns, and how to handle errors in less than 5 minutes!

This episode of Back to Basics covers best practices to establish communication

Figure 1. A diagram from Back to Basics video

Top 5: Featured Architecture Content for July

Post Syndicated from Elyse Lopez original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/best-top-5-featured-architecture-content-for-july/

The AWS Architecture Center provides new and notable reference architecture diagrams, vetted architecture solutions, AWS Well-Architected best practices, whitepapers, and more. This blog post features some of our best picks from the new and newly updated content we released this month.

1. Tag Tamer Solution

Consistency is key when you’re using tags to keep your AWS resources organized. This brand-new AWS Solutions Implementation helps you apply and manage tags for new and existing AWS resources via a pre-built web user interface that enforces tagging rules and helps you spot inconsistencies.

Tag Tamer solution

2. AWS DevOps Monitoring Dashboard

Do you need better insight into how your DevOps initiatives are performing? This new AWS Solutions Implementation automates the process of ingesting, analyzing, and visualizing continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) metrics for near-real-time analytics. The solution includes pre-built Amazon QuickSight dashboards, but you can also customize it for use with your existing business intelligence tools.

3. An Overview of AWS Cloud Data Migration Services

Migrating data to the cloud is a well-understood business imperative, but it’s still ongoing work for many, many AWS customers. Effective planning of data migrations—particularly when working with live, mission-critical data—should use best practices built from broad experience. This whitepaper was recently updated with the latest guidance.

4. Building an AWS Perimeter

In traditional on-premises environments, you establish a high-level perimeter to help keep untrusted entities from getting in and your data from getting out. This new whitepaper offers guidance on how to draw the same sort of circle around your AWS resources in the cloud so you can clearly separate “my AWS” from other customers.

5. AWS Well-Architected Tool

This update to the AWS Well-Architected Tool gives you the option to mark certain best practices as “not applicable” when you’re running a workload review, and to record why the best practice doesn’t apply. The new functionality offers better flexibility when certain best practices might not be applicable to your business needs or organizational maturity. You can mark best practices as not applicable using the Well-Architected API, too.

Top 5 Architecture Blog Posts for Q2 2021

Post Syndicated from Bonnie McClure original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/top-5-architecture-blog-posts-for-q2-2021/

The goal of the AWS Architecture Blog is to highlight best practices and provide architectural guidance. We publish thought leadership pieces that encourage readers to discover other technical documentation such as solutions and managed solutions, other AWS blogs, videos, reference architectures, whitepapers, and guides, training and certification, case studies, and the AWS Architecture Monthly Magazine. We welcome your contributions!

Field Notes is a series of posts within the Architecture Blog channel that provides hands-on technical guidance from AWS Solutions Architects, consultants, and technical account managers based on their experiences in the field solving real-world business problems for customers.

A big thank you to you, our readers, for spending time on our blog this past quarter. Of course, we wouldn’t have content for you to read without our hard-working AWS Solutions Architects and other blog post writers, so thank you to them as well! Without further ado, the following five posts were the top Architecture Blog and Field Notes blog posts published in Q2 (April through June 2021).

Honorable Mention: Managing Asynchronous Workflows with a REST API

by Scott Gerring

With 3,400 views since mid-May, Scott’s post is worth mentioning in our leaderboard. In this post, Scott shows you common patterns for handling REST API operations, their advantages/disadvantages, and their typical AWS serverless implementations. Understanding the options you have to build such a system with AWS serverless solutions is important to choosing the right tool for your problem.

Serverless polling architecture

#5: Scaling RStudio/Shiny using Serverless Architecture and AWS Fargate

by Chayan Panda, Michael Hsieh, and Mukosi Mukwevho

In this post, Chayan, Michael, and Mukosi discuss serverless architecture that addresses common challenges of hosting RStudio/Shiny servers. They show you best practices adapted from AWS Well-Architected. This architecture provides data science teams a secure, scalable, and highly available environment while reducing infrastructure management overhead.

RStudio-Shiny Open Source Deployment on AWS Serverless Infrastructure

#4: Disaster Recovery (DR) Architecture on AWS, Part III: Pilot Light and Warm Standby

by Seth Eliot

You’ll notice a recurring theme in this Top 5 post—Seth’s four-part DR series is really popular! Throughout the series, Seth shows you different strategies to prepare your workload for disaster events like natural disasters like earthquakes or floods, technical failures such as power or network loss, and human actions such as inadvertent or unauthorized modifications. Part III discusses two strategies to prepare your workload for a disaster event: pilot light and warm standby. The post shows you how to implement these strategies that help you limit data loss and downtime and how to get the most out of your set up.

Pilot light DR strategy

#3: Disaster Recovery (DR) Architecture on AWS, Part II: Backup and Restore with Rapid Recovery

by Seth Eliot

Part II covers the backup and restore strategy, the easiest and least expensive strategy to implement in the series. It shows you how, by using automation, you can minimize recovery time objectives and therefore lessen the impacts of downtime in the event of a disaster.

Backup and restore DR strategy

#2: Disaster Recovery (DR) Architecture on AWS, Part I: Strategies for Recovery in the Cloud | AWS Architecture Blog

by Seth Eliot

Part I gives you an overview of each strategy in the series (backup and restore, pilot light, standby, multi-site active/active) and how to select the best strategy for your business needs. Disaster events pose a threat to your workload availability, but by using AWS Cloud services you can mitigate or remove these threats.

DR strategies – trade-offs between RTO/RPO and costs

#1: Issues to Avoid When Implementing Serverless Architecture with AWS Lambda

by Andrei Maksimov

With almost 8,000 views as of this Top 5 post’s publication date, Andrei’s post has been a hit this quarter! In the post, he highlights eight common anti-patterns (solutions that may look like the right solution but end up being less effective than intended). He provides recommendations to avoid these patterns to ensure that your system is performing at its best.

Your contributions to the blog are immensely valuable to all our customers! Keep on writing!

Top 5: Featured Architecture Content for June

Post Syndicated from Elyse Lopez original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/top-5-featured-architecture-content-for-june/

The AWS Architecture Center provides new and notable reference architecture diagrams, vetted architecture solutions, AWS Well-Architected best practices, whitepapers, and more. This blog post features some of our top picks from the new and newly updated content we released this month.

1. Taco Bell: Aurora as The Heart of the Menu Middleware and Data Integration Platform for Taco Bell (YouTube)

This episode of the This is My Architecture video series explores how Taco Bell built a serverless data integration platform to create unique menus for more than 7,000 locations. Find out how this menu middleware uses Amazon Aurora combined with several other services, including AWS Amplify, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Step Functions to create a cost-effective, scalable data pipeline.

Image still from This is My Architecture video series

2. Well-Architected IoT Lens Checklist

How do you effectively implement AWS IoT workloads? This IoT Lens Checklist provides insights that we have gathered from real-world case studies. This will help you quickly learn the key design elements of Well-Architected IoT workloads. The checklist also provides recommendations for improvement.

3. Derive Insights from AWS Lake House

This whitepaper provides insights and design patterns for cloud architects, data scientists, and developers. It shows you how a lake house architecture allows you to query data across your data warehouse, data lake, and operational databases. Learn how you can store data in a data lake and use a ring of purpose-built data services to quickly make decisions.

4. AWS Limit Monitor Solution

This AWS Solutions Implementation helps you automatically track resource use and avoid overspending. Managed from a centralized location, this ready-to-deploy solution provides a cost-effective way to stay within service quotas by receiving notifications — even via Slack! — before you reach the limit.

5. Cloud Automation for 5G Networks

Digital services providers (DSPs) around the world are focusing on 5G development as part of upgrading their digital infrastructure. This whitepaper explains how DSPs can use different AWS tools and services to fully automate their 5G network deployment and testing and allow orchestration, closed loop use cases, edge analytics, and more.