A practitioner's view on the Well-Architected Framework

That esteemed collection of guiding principles and best practices, passed down from the lofty perches of technology vendors as though they were carved on stone tablets. And if you’ve been lucky enough to get hands-on time with cloud design or management, you’ll probably have gained an appreciation for just how important this framework is to observe the standards it sets out.

The true value of the framework guidelines

"Why should I care about a framework? Cloud has been around for ages now. Isn’t it all just common sense?" Maybe, but picture this. You’ve just arrived home from a visit to your local Swedish furniture store, eager to assemble your flat-packed dreams, but midway through, things are on the wonk. You step back only to realise something has gone horribly wrong. You have the knowledge, the tools, and a firm idea of the endpoint, so what’s missing? Sure, you may have thrown the instructions in the bin because, really, how hard could it be? But now you're four hours into the construction of your Bjorkenstagholden loft bed, and all you have to show for it is a row with your partner and a floor full of spare screws. That is why we need a Well-Architected Framework. It serves the same function as a manual, ensuring common sense is diligently implemented. The key way it does this is by distilling all the lessons, mistakes, and experiences of those who’ve walked this path before into a set of principles that help others avoid common, wasteful pitfalls.

So how do I do it? Where's the manual?

If the memories of a Saturday wasted on misguided furniture assembly have convinced you to approach your cloud architecture with more guidance, you may be wondering where you should even start. Thankfully, platform vendors will have plenty – and I do mean plenty – of documentation on the matter. For example, Amazon and Microsoft offer extensive guidance on design patterns for specific industries or workloads, along with a broad range of general advice that would benefit just about any platform. They even offer handy checklists to ensure you stay on target throughout your cloud journey. These written resources are an excellent place to start, but if the volume of helpful documentation seems overwhelming, I’d suggest approaching your design from the perspective of the Well-Architected Framework design pillars. This breaks the work down into more manageable lenses, and allows you to assign the most appropriate talent in your business to these critical areas. The pillars are designed to focus your efforts around a few key questions: 

• Reliability: Is the platform resilient, available, and recoverable?
• Cost Optimisation: How can you get the most value out of your cloud investment?
• Operational Excellence: Are workloads managed effectively?
• Performance Efficiency: Does resource capacity meet demand without over or under-utilisation?
• Security: What safeguards are in place to protect the cloud platform?

It’s vital to ensure you have specialist input along each pillar, as a weakness in any can affect the stability of the entire design. It’s a meticulous process that privileges both experience and attention to detail.

Sound like a lot of work?

It is! But the benefits make it a worthwhile undertaking. The framework will help you establish a cloud strategy that will guide your entire cloud journey. Luckily for us, it isn’t all just hours spent crawling through vast documentation libraries across several disciplines. In addition to written resources, platform providers offer varying degrees of tooling and automation to help guide you towards sound architectural principles. These usually come in the form of online questionnaires or guided tools, and while they may be slightly rigid in how they approach your business requirements, they absolutely can help keep things on track by highlighting gaps and surfacing issues.

What if I’ve already built something without instructions. What can I do?

So, the dog ate the instructions, and you built a cloud environment without expert guidance. Well, getting your lopsided Bjorkenstagholden into the right shape can be a tricky and nuanced undertaking. As with any system full of inherited quirks, it can take the gaze of an expert eye to disentangle good from bad, while establishing architectural principles that'll get you back on course and set you sailing into the future. Platform providers, combined with the advisor tools from Microsoft and AWS, are a solid place to start. They’ll assess your existing workloads against their best practices to offer insights and remediation advice to get you back in line with industry standards. Now, not every recommendation here will apply to your situation. Some may be stated in terms that are less than helpful, or offer remediation that isn’t thoroughly thought out. Still, I’d strongly suggest taking a periodic look at these dashboards, as they'll give you a good indication of how you measure up against the latest standards. And if you need help parsing the platform advisor tools, consider a Cloud Optimisation Assessment. Using the Well-Architected Framework, cloud optimisation experts guide an assessment of your existing cloud workloads and offer thoughtful, tailored advice.