AWS Well Architected Review

What is a Well-Architected Review?

A Well-Architected Review review is a good way to understand a workload in more depth, to share current best practices and ideas, and find out how mature a team’s understanding of the cloud is. The key benefits are to help teams build and deploy faster, lower or mitigate risks, make better informed decisions on strategy, and to learn AWS best practices.

Even mature teams can benefit from a review, keeping up-to-date is difficult, and it’s usually helpful to have another set of people with different experience to think about how a design might be improved. AWS are constantly launching new services and making improvements (nearly 2000 releases in 2018 across 140 products) – so even recently developed systems are likely to be able to benefit from recent changes.

To make sure that they can add value, and are appropriately skilled to carry out a review, in addition to their years of experience of cloud design and development, our reviewers have (at least) the AWS Solutions Architect professional level certification, and have attended a Well-Architected training course run by AWS.

To get the most out of the review, both technical staff and stakeholders that understand the product and strategy direction need to be present. This ensures that suggestions are made with appropriate context. For example, if a system is not under active development, then it might be possible to automatically disable environments until they’re needed. Or, if a system is due to receive a higher volume of traffic due to an advertising campaign, then the review would focus on scalability in more depth.

How does it work?

The review assesses workloads running in AWS against the best practices outlined in the AWS Well Architected Framework, covering the various “pillars”: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization.

Our reviewers take notes as they’re going along and will produce a written report including recommendations for improvements, organised by importance.

How much does it cost?

As AWS Well-Architected Partners, we run these reviews free of charge, so there’s no ongoing commitment or anything. You’re free to take the report and carry out improvements yourself. For us, it’s a great way for us to learn more about how teams are using the cloud and identify common problems that organisations are facing.

To encourage adoption of the report’s recommendations, AWS provides $5,000 of service credits to your organisation if:

• Infinity Works carries out the remediation of issues.
• The workload is in production.
• A minimum of 25% of any high risk issues identified in the report have been removed.
• You complete a customer satisfaction survey about Infinity Works.

If you’d like Infinity Works to carry out a Well Architected Review, please get in touch with us to arrange a date.