Faster hardware cycles

When hardware is provisioned on-premises, it starts becoming obsolete from the instant that it is purchased. Hardware prices have been on an exponential downtrend since the first computer was invented, so the server you bought a few months ago may now be cheaper, or a new version of the server may be out that’s faster and still costs the same. However, waiting until hardware improves or becomes cheaper is not an option. A decision needs to be made at some point to purchase.Using a cloud provider instead eliminates all these problems. For example, whenever AWS offers new and more powerful processor types, using them is as simple as stopping an instance, changing the processor type, and starting the instance again. In many cases, AWS may keep the price the same or even cheaper when better and faster processors and technology become available, especially with their own preoperatory technology like the Graviton chip.

System administration staff

An on-premises implementation may require a full-time system administration staff and a process to ensure that the team remains fully staffed. Cloud providers can handle many of these tasks by using cloud services, allowing you to focus on core application maintenance and functionality and not have to worry about infrastructure upgrades, patches, and maintenance.By offloading this task to the cloud provider, costs can come down because the administrative duties can be shared with other cloud customers instead of having a dedicated staff.

The Six pillars of a well-architected framework

That all leads us nicely into this section. The cloud, in general, and AWS, in particular, are so popular because they simplify the development of well-architected frameworks. If there is one must-read AWS document, titled AWS Well-Architected Framework, which spells out the six pillars of a well-architected framework. The full document can be found here:https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework/welcome.html AWS provides Well-Architected Review (WAR) Tool, which provides prescriptive guidance about each pillar to validate your workload against architecture best practices and generate a comprehensive report. Please find a glimpse of the tool below:

To kick off a well-architected review for your workload, first, you need to provide the workload information such as name, environment type (production or pre-production), AWS workload hosting regions, industry, reviewer name, etc. After submitting the information, you will see in the above WAR tool screenshot that there is a set of questions in relation to each well-architected pillar with the option to select what is most relevant to your workload. AWS provides prescriptive guidance and various resources to apply architecture best practices against each question asked on the right navigation.As AWS has provided detailed guidance for each WAR pillar in their document, let’s look at the main points about the six pillars of a well-architected framework.