The Importance of Being Well-Architected

Success in the cloud begins with good architecture choices. This content was delivered as a webinar.

You'll learn how to make good design choices, and the benefits of working with an AWS partner to review your platform against good Well-Architected practices, taking into account operations, security, cost, performance, and reliability.

For a limited time, the video of this talk is available at https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/vpwscIHo9nlJZLftsn7FQohwJtj8T6a82nQd__sLnU__jPVvs3ayi3ZOwOeZ-63h
Password: 0h*O89@v

Transcript

1. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING WELL-ARCHITECTED_ JON TOPPER | @jtopper | he/him/his
2. $ whoami Founder/CEO/CTO The Scale Factory Working in hosting/infrastructure for 20 years Infrastructure / AWS / DevOps
4. Leading Well-Architected Partner Worldwide >200 Reviews Completed Since April 2018 Book a Well-Architected review today https:/ /scalefactory.com/services/well-architected/ $5,000 funding available to support improvement work
5. 0 45 90 135 180 Mar-2018 May-2018 Jul-2018 Sep-2018 Nov-2018 Jan-2019 Mar-2019 May-2019 Jul-2019 Sep-2019 Nov-2019 Jan-2020 REVIEWS RUN_
6. THE TEAM_
7. OUR CLIENTS_
8. TODAY’S AGENDA_ What is Well-Architected? What is a Well-Architected Review? Pillar overview Common review findings
9. WHAT IS WELL-ARCHITECTED?_
10. WELL ARCHITECTED ORIGINS_ Catalogue of emergent good practices Observed by AWS Field Solutions Architects Codified and shared Platform agnostic*
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    $ White Papers Review Tool
12. Performance Efficiency Cost Optimisation Operational Excellence Reliability Security
13. IoT (Internet of Things) High Performance Computing Serverless Applications Lenses Machine Learning
14. USING WELL-ARCHITECTED_ Gap analysis / planning Teaching Team alignment
15. WHAT IS A WELL-ARCHITECTED REVIEW?_
16. WELL ARCHITECTED REVIEW_ Foundational questions Up to 4 hours Qualitative
17. Performance Efficiency Cost Optimisation Operational Excellence Reliability Security Well Architected Core Serverless Applications High Performance Computing IoT (Internet of Things) 9 11 9 8 9 2 3 2 1 1 4 3 3 4 2 4 11 6 10 4 46 9 16 35 Machine Learning 7 3 5 2 4 21
18. QUESTION OPS 1_ • Evaluate external customer needs • Evaluate internal customer needs • Evaluate compliance requirements • Evaluate threat landscape • Evaluate tradeoffs • Manage benefits and risks • None of these How do you determine what your priorities are?
19. USING WELL-ARCHITECTED_ Gap analysis / planning Teaching Team alignment
20. PILLAR OVERVIEW_
21. Performance Efficiency Cost Optimisation Operational Excellence Reliability Security
22. MAIN AREAS_ Operational priorities Software Delivery Lifecycle Risk reduction Monitoring / Telemetry Documentation Continuous Improvement
23. CONTINUOUS DELIVERY PIELINE_ Linting Unit Tests Artefact Build SAST Deploy to Test Integration Test Performance Test DAST Deploy to UAT Deploy to Live
24. https:/ /services.google.com/fh/files/misc/state-of-devops-2019.pdf
25. CENTRAL MONITORING_ User monitoring Application monitoring (RED) Infrastructure monitoring Make dashboards available
26. CENTRAL LOGGING_ Structured logs Add relevant IDs (transaction, user, etc) Make dashboards available Represent “events” on dashboards
27. Performance Efficiency Cost Optimisation Operational Excellence Reliability Security
28. "Low performers take weeks to conduct security reviews and complete the changes identified. In contrast, elite performers build security in and can conduct security reviews and complete changes in just days." http:/ /services.google.com/fh/files/misc/state-of-devops-2018.pdf
29. MAIN AREAS_ Identity and access management Detective controls Infrastructure protection Data protection Incident response
30. Somebody Else's Problem
31. QUESTION SEC 11_ • Identify key personnel and external resources • Identify tooling • Develop incident response plans • Automate containment capability • Identify forensic capabilities • Pre-provision access • Pre-deploy tools • Run game days • None of these How do you respond to a [security] incident? WA CI High Risk 75% NI 51% HRI Rank: 2 WA WA NI 27% 39% 0% 11% 27% 10% 3% 35% NI NI NI (93%)
32. QUESTION SEC 8_ • Define data classification requirements • Define data protection controls • Implement data identification • Automate identification and classification • Identify the types of data • None of these How do you classify your data? WA CI High Risk 75% HRI Rank: 3 WA WA 61% 39% 17% 4% 59% 23% NI NI (88%)
33. TEAMS NEED TO DO BETTER AT SECURITY_ Poor hygiene around patching Limited data classification Mediocre human access control Bad programmatic access control Low adoption of security monitoring tools
34. Performance Efficiency Cost Optimisation Operational Excellence Reliability Security
35. MAIN AREAS_ Foundations Change Management Failure Management
36. AVAILABILITY DESIGN_ Clustering / Failover Autoscaling Multi-AZ (and Multi-Region) operation Caching Asynchronous processing Backpressure / Circuit breakers
37. PLAN FOR FAILURE_ Build a list of potential failure scenarios Understand how your platform will react Game days (tabletop) Mitigate / Document Game days (live failure injection)
39. QUESTION REL 8_ • Use playbooks for unanticipated failures • Conduct root cause analysis and share results • Inject failures to test resiliency • Conduct game days regularly • None of these How do you test resilience? WA CI High Risk 67% HRI Rank: 5 WA 25% NI (92%) NI 73% 6% 0% 16%
40. QUESTION REL 9_ • Define recovery objectives for downtime and data loss • Use defined recovery strategies to meet the recovery objectives • Test disaster recovery implementation to validate the implementation • Manage configuration drift on all changes • Automate recovery • None of these How do you plan for disaster recovery? WA CI High Risk 79% NI 33% HRI Rank: 1 WA WA NI 33% 25% 39% 16% 31% (87%)
41. TEAMS ARE BAD AT THINKING ABOUT FAILURE MODES_ Not considering business requirements No risk analysis of failure modes Poor documentation Almost no attempt to rehearse outages
42. Performance Efficiency Cost Optimisation Operational Excellence Reliability Security
43. MAIN AREAS_ Choosing the right components Configuring things correctly Reviewing these choices regularly Monitoring for performance
44. EC2 Instances Containers on k8s or ECS Containers on Fargate Lambda Compute Most Security effort required Least Security effort required Least Serverless Most Serverless Least Opinionated Most Opinionated Least suitable for microservices Most suitable for microservices
45. Data RDS PostgreSQL RDS MySQL Aurora RedShift DynamoDB MongoDB DocumentDB AWS Neptune Neo4J Cassandra Amazon Timestream InfluxDB Relational Key-Value Document Graph Time Series Quantum Ledger Ledger Hyperledger Fabric Ethereum MySQL PostgreSQL
46. Performance Efficiency Cost Optimisation Operational Excellence Reliability Security
47. QUESTION COST 9_ • Establish a cost optimisation function • Develop a workload review process • Review and implement services in an unplanned way • Review and analyse this workload regularly • Keep up to date with new service releases • None of these How do you evaluate new services? WA CI High Risk 71% HRI Rank: 4 WA 34% 26% 84% NI NI (79%) NI 43% 63% 1%
48. MAIN AREAS_ Governance Monitoring for usage Decommissioning unused resources Matching supply/demand Using pricing models
49. WHAT NEXT?_ Read the white papers: https:/ /aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/ Run your own review(s) https:/ /aws.amazon.com/well-architected-tool/ Engage a AWS Well-Architected partner https:/ /scalefactory.com/services/well-architected/ (funding available)
50. EVERYONE IS BETTER AT BUILDING PLATFORMS THAN THEY ARE AT SECURING OR RUNNING THEM_
51. TALK TO US ABOUT: CONSULTANCY TRAINING WELL-ARCHITECTED MIGRATION
52. Leading Well-Architected Partner Worldwide >200 Reviews Completed Since April 2018 Book a Well-Architected review today https:/ /scalefactory.com/services/well-architected/ $5,000 funding available to support improvement work
53. BREAKFAST OPS_ Monthly hosted discussion For CTOs and tech decision makers
54. Q&A_
55. KEEP IN TOUCH_ http:/ /www.scalefactory.com/ @scalefactory jon@scalefactory.com