Content Domain 1: Cloud Concepts

Task Statement 1.2: Identify design principles of the AWS Cloud

Let's get started with the second task statement, which is to identify design principles of AWS. A key focus for this task statement is the AWS Well-Architected Framework. For this exam, ensure you have a solid understanding of how to use the AWS Well-Architected Framework to design and build resilient, highly available and cost optimized environments. What is the AWS Well-Architected Framework? The AWS Well-Architected Framework is AWS's best practices and the core strategies for architecting systems in the cloud. It helps you design, build and operate reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems that will increase your likelihood of success. And the AWS Well-Architected Framework is based on six pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability. The Well-Architected Framework also identifies a set of general design principles to facilitate good design in the cloud which are to: stop guessing your capacity, use auto scaling to ensure your supply meets your demand, test systems at production scale, automate your architecture and this makes experimentation easier, allow for evolutionary changes and use data to make the needed changes and to improve through game days and run tests to see your systems at production level. You may be asking, "Julie, why is this important? Why are we discussing cloud computing and the Well-Architected Framework?" Well, the reason is that this gives you a solid basis for understanding AWS and it will benefit you to take the time to learn and understand these fundamental concepts going into your exam. AWS also provides an AWS Well-Architected Tool along with the best practices to help us too and this tool will review your workloads and compare your workloads to the latest AWS best practices for architectural design. And these best practices for architectural design come directly from the AWS Well-Architected Framework. I will add a link for the AWS Well-Architected Framework and also a link for the tool in case you want to take a deeper dive. The first pillar is operational excellence which is the ability to support development and run workloads effectively, gain insight into their operations, and to continuously improve supporting processes and procedures to deliver business value. There are five design principles for operational excellence: perform operations as code, make frequent, small, reversible changes, refine operations procedures frequently, anticipate failure, and learn from all operational failures. The second pillar encompasses the ability to protect data, systems and assets to take advantage of cloud technologies to improve your security. There are seven design principles for security in the cloud: implement a strong identity foundation, maintain traceability, apply security at all layers, automate security best practices, protect data in transit and at rest, keep people away from data, and prepare for security events. The reliability pillar encompasses the ability of a workload to perform its intended function correctly and consistently when it's expected to. This includes the ability to operate and test the workload through its total lifecycle. There are five design principles for reliability in the cloud: automatically recover from failure, test recovery procedures, scale horizontally to increase aggregate workload availability, stop guessing capacity, and manage change in automation. The performance efficiency pillar includes the ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve. There are five design principles for performance efficiency in the cloud: democratize advanced technologies, go global in minutes, use serverless architectures, experiment more often, and consider mechanical sympathy. The cost optimization pillar includes the ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point. And we will cover the cost optimization pillar under Domain 4, billing, pricing, and support. And the sixth pillar is the sustainability pillar. This pillar focuses on environmental impacts, especially energy consumption and efficiency, because they are important levers for architects to inform direct action to reduce resource usage. There are six design principles for sustainability in the cloud: understand your impact, establish sustainability goals, maximize utilization, anticipate and adopt new, more efficient hardware and software offerings, use managed services and reduce the downstream impact of your cloud workloads. And ensure you understand the best practices for all of the pillars too. The AWS Well-Architected Framework is really important in the real world, for this exam, and for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate certification. You will most likely see questions on this certification exam asking which design principles for specific requirements or use cases would you choose when designing systems or solutions in AWS. So, take some time to read and build solutions. Ensure you know how to design for failures, decouple your components which reinforces the service-oriented architecture design principle, implement elasticity using auto scaling, security and parallelization which are necessary for building highly scalable applications in AWS. Really quickly, I want to define parallelization because I think I defined the others already. Thinking parallel is similar to decoupling, but it is how to divide a job into its simplest form and then distribute that load to multiple components to handle the demand. And an example would be breaking down large datasets into smaller chunks that can be processed simultaneously and provide faster processing times. And back to our first lesson, an advantage of AWS is being able to focus on services and designs, not servers and hardware as well as the fast implementation and launching of those resources too. Let's get started with the third task statement to understand the benefits of and strategies for migration to AWS.