5 Reasons Your Development Team Should be Using the Well-Architected Framework

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers the most powerful platforms and innovative cloud technologies in the industry, helping you scale your business on demand, maximize efficiencies, minimize costs, and secure data. But in order to take full advantage of what AWS has to offer, you need to start with a clear understanding of your workload in the cloud.

How to Build Better Workloads

Whether you’re working with an internal team or an outsourced consulting partner, the AWS Well-Architected Framework is an educational tool that builds awareness of steps and best practices for architecting for the AWS Cloud. We begin all of our development projects with a Well-Architected Review to give clients full visibility into their workload. This precise, comprehensive process provides them essential insights for comparing strategies, evaluating options, and making informed decisions that add business value. Based on our experience, using well-architected best practices and design principles helps you:

1. Plan for failure

One of the primary Well-Architected design principles is to architect for failure. This means knowing how to mitigate risks, eliminate downtime, prevent data loss, and protect against security threats. The Well-Architected process uncovers potential security and reliability vulnerabilities long before they happen so you can either avoid them or build a plan proactively for how you’ll respond if they do. This upfront effort can save you considerable time and resources. For example, having a disaster recovery plan in place can make it far easier for you to spin up another environment if something crashes.

Clients who plan for failure shrink their Recovery Time Objective (downtime) and their Recovery Point Objective (data loss) by 2000%.

2. Minimize surprises

Mitigating your risks also means minimizing surprises. The Well-Architected Framework offers an in-depth and comprehensive process for analyzing your choices and options as well as for evaluating how a given decision can impact your business. In our Well-Architected Reviews, we walk you through in-depth questions about your workload to create an accurate and holistic view of what lies ahead. When the review answers and recommendations are shared with all departments and stakeholders of a workload, they’re often surprised by the impacts of decisions on costs, performance, reliability and security.

3. Understand the trade-offs of your decisions

Building well-architected workloads ensures you have options for responding to changing business requirements or external issues, with a structure for evaluating the trade-offs of every one of those choices. If you feel your application isn’t performant, you may have 10 different possible solutions for improving performance. Each one has a tradeoff, whether it be cost, maintainability, or more. The Well-Architected Framework can help your team decide the best option.

Identifying and executing refactoring options based on modern technologies and services can save up to 60% of architecture costs.

As an organization, you should never feel boxed in when it comes to options for improving your workload. The process and questions presented in the Well-Architected Framework can help both your technical and business departments look at all options and identify which ones will have the most positive business impact.

In 75% of the workloads we encounter, the technology department is making the decisions, which means there is no input from business stakeholders as to impacts.

4. Develop KPIs to monitor the overall health of your application

Choosing KPIs that integrate both technical and business indicators gives you valuable insights into your application’s health and performance. With a Well-Architected approach, you can automate monitoring and set up alarms to notify you of any deviance from expected performance. Once you’ve established this baseline, you can start exploring ways to improve your workload.

KPI’s should be driven by business and should include all areas of your organization including Security, Finance, Operations, IT and Sales. The Well-Architected Framework provides a well-rounded perspective of workload health.

After a Well-Architected Review, it’s common to have 90% of KPIs defining the health of your application come from other business departments – not just from the IT team.

5. Align your business requirements with engineering goals

Following well-architected best practices also facilitates a DevOps approach that fosters close collaboration between business managers and engineers. When the two are communicating effectively, they understand both the engineering concepts and the business impacts of their decisions. This saves time and resources and leads to more holistic solutions.

To fully leverage the AWS Cloud, make sure your development team has a strong foundation in the Well-Architected Framework. You’ll be able to build better workloads for the cloud that can take your business further, faster.

Have an idea or project to discuss? Contact us to learn more.

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