Well-Architected Framework Components
Published: 2022-04-19 22:38:13



## What are the components of the Well-Architected Framework?

The Well-Architected Framework provides a set of design principles and questions, with associated best practices, across five pillars. The questions help you evaluate your architecture, while the best practices and design principles help improve and guide your architecture.

## What are the five Well-Architected Framework pillars?

Creating a software system is a lot like constructing a building. If the foundational elements are not solid, structural problems can undermine the integrity and function of the building. Similarly, if you neglect the Well-Architected Framework pillars when architecting technology solutions, it can become challenging to build a system that delivers functional requirements and meets your expectations.

The five pillars of the Framework include Security, Relibility, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Operational Excellence. Incorporating these pillars will help you produce stable and efficient systems, allowing you to focus on functional requirements.

### Operational Excellence pillar

The Operational Excellence pillar focuses on establishing the foundations that will enable long-term operations success.

### Security pillar

The Security pillar focuses on the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value.

### Reliability pillar

The Reliability pillar focuses on the ability of a workload to perform its required function correctly and consistently, over an expected period of time. This includes the ability to operate and test the workload through its total lifecycle.

### Performance Efficiency pillar

The Performance Efficiency pillar focuses on the efficient use of computing resources to meet requirements, and how to maintain efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.

### Cost Optimization pillar

The Cost Optimization pillar focuses on the ability to run systems that deliver business value at the lowest price point.

> When architecting workloads, you make trade-offs between pillars based on your business context. These business decisions can drive your engineering priorities.

## What are the types of design principles?

The Well-Architected Framework identifies a set of general and pillar-specific design principles to facilitate good design in the cloud. Design principles help you adopt the appropiate mental model when building for the cloud. This helps you take advantage of the capabilties of AWS, freeing you from the constraints of traditional approaches.

### General design principles

General design principles are applicable to the overarching Well-Architected Framework.

### Pillar-specific design principles

Pillar design principles are specific to each pillar.

> In the cloud, the constraints faced in the traditional environment have been removed, so you use these principles to take advantage of that.

## What are the general design principles?

### Stop guessing your capacity needs

Whith cloud computing, you can use as much or as little capacity as you need, and scale up and down automatically.

### Test systems at production scale

In the cloud, you can create a production-scale test environment on demand, complete your testing, and then decommission the resources. Because you only pay for the test environment when it's running, you can simulate your live environment for fraction of the cost of testing on premises.

### Automate to make architectural experimentation easier

Automation allows you to create and replicate your workloads at low cost, and avoid the expense of manual effort. You can track changes to your automation.

### Allow for evolutionary architectures

In a traditional environment, architectural decisions are often implemented as static, one-time events, with a few major versions of a system during its lifetime. As a business and its context continue to evolve, these initial decisions might hinder the system's ability to deliver changing business requirements.

In the cloud, the capability to automate and test on demand lower the risk of impact from design changes. This allows systems to evolve over time so that business can take advantage of innovations as a standard practice.

### Drive architectures using data

In the cloud, you can collect data on how your architectural choices affect the behavior of your workload. This lets make fact-based decisions on how to improve your workload. Your cloud infrastructure is code, so you can use that data to inform your architecture choices and improvements over time.

### Improve through Game Days

Test how your architecture and processes perform by regularly scheduling Game Days to simulate events in production. This will help you understand where improvements can be made and help develop organizational experience in dealing with events.

## How are Well-Architected Framework questions structured?

Each pillar of the Framework is comprised of a set of 8-11 questions, organized into best practice areas. Questions are intentionally phrased to be open-ended to guide the discussion about your approach and considerations when designing and building the workload.

Each question includes a set of best practices. Best practices outline the approach, processes, and methods that help lead to the best outcome for that question.