“Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with smart people who argue with you.” – John Wooden
Many AWS customers and practitioners have leveraged the Well-Architected Framework methodology in building new applications or migrating existing applications. Once a build or migration is complete, how many companies implement Well-Architected Framework reviews and perform those reviews regularly? We have found that many companies today do not conduct regular Well Architected Framework reviews and as a result, potentially face a multitude of risks.
What is a Well-Architected Framework?
The Well-Architected Framework is a methodology designed to provide high-level guidance on best practices when using AWS products and services. Whether building new or migrating existing workloads, security, reliability, performance, cost optimization, and operational excellence are vital to the integrity of the workload and can even be critical to the success of the company. A review of your architecture is especially critical when the rate of innovation of new products and services are being created and implemented by Cloud Service Providers (CSP).
2nd Watch Well-Architected Framework Reviews
At 2nd Watch, we provide Well-Architected Framework reviews for our existing and prospective clients. The review process allows customers to make informed decisions about architecture decisions, the potential impact those decisions have on their business, and tradeoffs they are making. 2nd Watch offers its clients free Well-Architected Framework reviews—conducted on a regular basis—for mission-critical workloads that could have a negative business impact upon failure.
Examples of issues we have uncovered and remediated through Well-Architected Reviews:
- Security: Not protecting data in transit and at rest through encryption
- Cost: Low utilization and inability to map cost to business units
- Reliability: Single points of failure where recovery processes have not been tested
- Performance: A lack of benchmarking or proactive selection of services and sizing
- Operations: Not tracking changes to configuration management on your workload
Using a standard based methodology, 2nd Watch will work closely with your team to thoroughly review the workload and will produce a detailed report outlining actionable items, timeframes, as well as provide prescriptive guidance in each of the key architectural pillars.
In reviewing your workload and architecture, 2nd Watch will identify areas of improvement, along with a detailed report of our findings. A separate paid engagement will be available to clients and prospects who want our AWS Certified Solutions Architects and AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professionals to remediate our findings. To schedule your free Well-Architected Framework review, contact 2nd Watch today.
— Chris Resch, EVP Cloud Solutions, 2nd Watch
