Fifth pillar – operational excellence

The operational excellence of a workload should be measured across these dimensions:

• Agility
• Reliability
• Performance

The ideal way to optimize these metrics is to standardize and automate the management of these workloads. To achieve operational excellence, AWS recommends these principles:

• Perform operations as code
• Make frequent, small, reversible changes
• Refine operations procedures frequently
• Anticipate failure
• Learn from all operational failures

You can find the operational excellence pillar checklist from Well-Architected Tool below with 11 questions covering multiple aspects to make sure your architecture is optimized to run in production:

Sustainability is now the talk of the town where all the organizations worldwide recognize their social responsibilities and take the pledge to make business more sustainable. As a leader, AWS is the first cloud provider to launch suitability as architecture practice in re: invent 2021. Let’s look into more details of the sustainability pillar of the Well-Architected framework.

Sixth pillar – sustainability

As more and more organizations adopt Cloud, cloud providers can lead the charge to make the world more sustainable in improving the environment, economics, social and human life. The “United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development” defines sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Your organization can have direct or indirect negative impacts on the earth’s environment by carbon emissions or damaging natural resources like clean water or farming land. To reduce environmental impact, it’s important to talk about sustainability and adapt it in practice wherever possible. AWS is achieving that by adding the sixth pillar to its well-architected framework with the following design principle :

• Understand your impact
• Establish sustainability goals
• Maximize utilization
• Anticipate and adopt new, more efficient hardware and software offerings
• Use managed services
• Reduce the downstream impact of your cloud workloads

You can find the sustainability pillar checklist from Well-Architected Tool below with six well thoughts questions covering multiple aspects to make sure your architecture is sustainable:

While a Well-Architected framework provides more generic guidance to optimize your architecture which is applicable across workloads, there is a need for more specific architectural practice for the specialized workload. That’s where AWS published well-architected lenses to address workload and domain-specific needs. Let’s take an overview of AWS’s well-architected lenses.