Third pillar – performance efficiency

In some respects, over-provisioning resources are just as bad as not having enough capacity to handle your workloads. Launching a constantly idle or almost idle instance is a sign of bad design. Resources should not be at full capacity and should be utilized efficiently. AWS provides various features and services to assist in creating architectures with high efficiency. However, we are still responsible for ensuring that the architectures we design are suitable and correctly sized for our applications.When it comes to performance efficiency, the recommended design best practices are as follows:

• Democratize advanced technologies.
• Go global in minutes.
• Use serverless architectures
• Experiment more often
• Consider mechanical sympathy

You can find the Performance efficiency pillar checklist from Well-Architected Tool below with eight questions covering multiple aspects to make sure your architecture is optimized for performance :

Cost optimization is one of the primary motivators for businesses to move to the Cloud. However, Cloud can become expensive if you don’t apply best practices and run the cloud workload the same way you run the on-premise workload. The Cloud can save you tons of money with proper cost optimization techniques. Let’s look into the next pillar, cost optimization.

Fourth pillar – cost optimization

This pillar is related to the third pillar. Suppose your architecture is efficient and can accurately handle varying application loads and adjust as traffic changes. Additionally, your architecture should identify when resources are not being used and allow you to stop them or, even better, stop these unused compute resources for you. In this department, AWS also allows you to turn on monitoring tools that will automatically shut down resources if they are not being utilized. We strongly encourage you to adopt a mechanism to stop these resources once they are identified as idle. This is especially useful in the development and test environments.To enhance cost optimization, these principles are suggested:

• Implement cloud financial management
• Adopt a consumption model
• Measure overall efficiency
• Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting
• Analyze and attribute expenditure

Whenever possible, use AWS-managed services instead of services you need to manage yourself. Managed cloud-native services should lower your administration expenses. You can find the cost optimization pillar checklist from Well-Architected Tool below with ten questions covering multiple aspects to make sure your architecture is optimized for cost :

Significant work starts after deploying your production workload, making operational excellence a critical factor. You need to make sure your application maintains the expected performance in production and improves efficacy by applying maximum automation. Let’s look at more details into the operational excellence pillar.