Mobycast

Previously on Mobycast...
In episodes #78 and #79, we broke down the AWS Well-Architected Framework, and covered the first three pillars of excellence: "Operational Excellence", "Security" and "Reliability".
This week on Mobycast, Jon and Chris wrap up their three-part series and discuss the last two pillars of excellence, "Performance Efficiency" and "Cost Optimization". We then bring it all together by explaining how to perform a Well-Architected Review. Spoiler alert: the Well-Architected Tool is a fabulous resource that you need to have in your toolkit.

Show Notes

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Show Details

In this episode, we cover the following topics:
  • Pillars in depth
    • Performance Efficiency
      • "Ability to use resources efficiently to meet system requirements and maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technology evolves"
      • Design principles
        • Easy to try new advanced technologies (by letting AWS manage them, instead of standing them up yourself)
        • Go global in minutes
        • Use serverless architectures
        • Experiment more often
        • Mechanical sympathy (use the technology approach that aligns best to what you are trying to achieve)
      • Key service: CloudWatch
      • Focus areas
        • Selection
          • Services: EC2, EBS, RDS, DynamoDB, Auto Scaling, S3, VPC, Route53, DirectConnect
        • Review
          • Services: AWS Blog, AWS What's New
        • Monitoring
          • Services: CloudWatch, Lambda, Kinesis, SQS
        • Tradeoffs
          • Services: CloudFront, ElastiCache, Snowball, RDS (read replicas)
      • Best practices
        • Selection
          • Choose appropriate resource types
            • Compute, storage, database, networking
        • Trade Offs
          • Proximity and caching
    • Cost Optimization
      • "Ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point"
      • Design principles
        • Adopt a consumption model (only pay for what you use)
        • Measure overall efficiency
        • Stop spending money on data center operations
        • Analyze and attribute expenditures
        • Use managed services to reduce TCO
      • Key service: AWS Cost Explorer (with cost allocation tags)
      • Focus areas
        • Expenditure awareness
          • Services: Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, CloudWatch, SNS
        • Cost-effective resources
          • Services: Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, Cost Explorer
        • Matching supply and demand
          • Services: Auto Scaling
        • Optimizing over time
          • Services: AWS Blog, AWS What's New, Trusted Advisor
      • Key points
        • Use Trusted Advisor to find ways to save $$$
  • The Well-Architected Review
    • Centered around the question "Are you well architected?"
    • The Well-Architected review provides a consistent approach to review workload against current AWS best practices and gives advice on how to architect for the cloud
    • Benefits of the review
      • Build and deploy faster
      • Lower or mitigate risks
      • Make informed decisions
      • Learn AWS best practices
  • The AWS Well-Architected Tool
    • Cloud-based service available from the AWS console
    • Provides consistent process for you to review and measure your architecture using the AWS Well-Architected Framework
    • Helps you:
      • Learn
      • Measure
      • Improve
    • Improvement plan
      • Based on identified high and medium risk topics
      • Canned list of suggested action items to address each risk topic
    • Milestones
      • Makes a read-only snapshot of completed questions and answers
    • Best practices
      • Save milestone after initially completing workload review
      • Then, whenever you make large changes to your workload architecture, perform a subsequent review and save as a new milestone
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End Song:
The Shadow Gallery by Roy England

For a full transcription of this episode, please visit the episode webpage.

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What is Mobycast?

A Podcast About Cloud Native Software Development, AWS, and Distributed Systems