[AWS SAA-C02 Study Note] Architecture

High Availability (HA)

The ability for a system to remain available.

Scale Up and Scale Out

When utilization increases and we are reaching capacity we can:

You will generally want to scale out and then up to balance complexity and availability

Well-Architected Framework

Reference

aws.amazon.com/archiecture

aws.amazon.com/whitepapers

Five Pillars: security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, operational excellence

  • Design Principles

general design principles → pillar-specific design principles

General Design Principles

  1. Stop guessing your capacity needs
  2. Test systems at production scale
  3. Automate to make architectural experimentation easier
  4. Allow for evolutionary architectures
  5. Build data-driven architectures
  6. Improve through game days

Security Pillar

Job 0, most important, first prority

  1. Apply security at all layers
  2. Enable traceability
  3. Implement a principle of least privilege
  4. Focus on securing your system
  5. Automate security best practices

Key Service for Security

Reliability Pillar

  1. Test recovery procedures
  2. Automatically recover from failure
  3. Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability
  4. Stop guessing capacity
  5. Manage change in automation

Performance & Efficiency Pillar

Storage architecture, add caching, sometimes in conflict with Reliability Pillar

  1. Democratize advanced technologies
  2. Go global in minutes
  3. Use serverless architectures
  4. Experiment more often
  5. Mechanical sympathy

Cost Optimization Pillar

  1. Adopt a consumption model
  2. Benefit from economies of scale
  3. Stop spending money on data center operations
  4. Analyze and attribute expenditure
  5. Use managed services (half-managed and full-managed) to reduce cost of ownership (focus more on productive task)

Operational Excellence Pillar

Topics explored in Operations Excellence

  • What best practices for cloud operations are you using?
  • How are you doing configuration management for your workload?
  • How are you evolving your workload while minimizing the impact of change?
  • How do you monitor your workload to ensure it is operating as expected?
  • How do you respond to unplanned operational events?
  • How is escalation managed when responding to unplanned operational events?

Design Principles

  1. Align operations processes to business objectives
  2. Perform operations with code
  3. Make regular, small, incremental changes
  4. Test for responses to unexpected events
  5. Learn from operational events and failure
  6. Keep operations procedures current

Key Services for Operational Excellence

Share Responsibility between AWS and Customer

AWS Trusted Advisor

AWS Solution Architect advice service.

Benefit of Well-Architect

  • Think Cloud-Natively

  • Understand Potenial Impact

  • Visibility of Risks

  • Consistent Approach to Reviewing Architecture