The first pillar – Security

Security should always be a top priority in both on-premises and cloud architectures. All security aspects should be considered, including data encryption and protection, access management, infrastructure security, network security, monitoring, and breach detection and inspection.

• To enable system security and to guard against nefarious actors and vulnerabilities, AWS recommends these architectural principles:
• Implement a strong identity foundation
• Enable traceability.
• Apply security at all levels.
• Automate security best practices.
• Protect data in transit and at rest:
• Keep people away from data:
• Prepare for security events:

You can find the security pillar checklist from Well-Architected Tool below, which has ten questions with one or more options relevant to your workload:The next pillar, reliability, is almost as important as security, as you want your workload to perform its business function consistently and reliably.

The second pillar – Reliability

Another characteristic of a well-architected framework is minimizing or eliminating single points of failure. Ideally, every component should have a backup. The backup should be able to come online as quickly as possible and in an automated manner, without human intervention. Self-healing is another important concept to attain reliability. An example of this is how Amazon S3 handles data replication. At any given time, there are at least six copies of any object stored in Amazon S3. If, for some reason, one of the resources storing one of these copies fails, AWS will automatically recover from this failure, mark that resource as unavailable, and create another copy of the object using a healthy resource to keep the number of copies at six. The well-architected framework paper recommends these design principles to enhance reliability:

• Automatically recover from failure
• Test recovery procedures
• Scale horizontally to increase aggregate workload availability
• Stop guessing capacity
• Manage change in automation

You can find the reliability pillar checklist from Well-Architected Tool below:

To retain the users, you need your application to be high performant and respond within seconds or milliseconds as per the nature of your workload. This makes performance a key pillar when building your application. Let’s learn more details on performance efficiency.