Trucking on with our series exploring the AWS Well-Architected Framework. We’ll be taking a look at the Performance Efficiency Pillar.
Like our other posts, we’re going to break down this pillar overview into a few parts to put some structure around all this information:
- AWS Performance Efficiency Pillar Overview
- The Pillar Design Principles
- Best Practice Areas
Performance Efficiency Pillar Overview
The AWS Well-Architected Performance Efficiency Pillar of the 6 pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Its intention is to help companies build their architecture using AWS best practices.
This pillar focuses on optimizing the performance and cost of your application. This can be achieved by taking advantage of the various AWS services available.
In this next section, I’ll touch on the design principles and best practices.
Let’s dive into the design principles first
Understanding the AWS Well-Architected Performance Efficiency Pillar
Performance Efficiency Pillar General Design Principles
- Democratize Advanced Technologies
- Go Global in Minutes
- Use Serverless Architectures
- Experiment More Often
- Consider Mechanical Sympathy
We’ll walk through these one by one to get a better understanding of each principle here.
Democratize Advanced Technologies
This design principle is all about trying to make life easier for you and your teams. Try to shift complex tasks to vendor solutions. It’s likely your engineering teams will be much more efficient at simply consuming a SaaS solution or a managed service from AWS rather than doing all the development, operations and training in-house.
Many companies today rely on technologies that need highly specialized skill sets to develop and maintain. Democratizing these technologies and simply consuming them from AWS (or other vendors) frees up your teams to better focus on your business.
Go Global in Minues
AWS has 30 regions available today, and more on the way. This allows you to take advantage of their global footprint. Leverage it to reduce your infrastructure and reduce application latency. This all amounts to a better customer experience.
Use Serverless Architectures
Now we could talk about serverless all day, it deserves it’s own topic. But the general theme in the context performance efficiency, is that you should avoid running resources yourself. Cloud services allow you to get the benefit of services without the underlying components. How does this help? Well, you’ll reduce operational overhead of deploying, maintaining, and operating these resources yourself.
Another benefit of going serverless is scalability. AWS has designed their services to scale to even the most demanding workloads. This further reduces the burden of running applications and meeting infrastructure demands.
Experiment More Often
Break some eggs! You’re encouraged to experiment and see what works and what doesn’t. AWS is constantly pumping out new features and EC2 instance types. Make sure to experiment and tweak your infrastructure. Leverage the latest advancements and find the optimal price-to-performance ratio for your needs.
Consider Mechanical Sympathy
Keep the purpose and business logic in mind when choosing your technology solutions. It’s easy to get lost in all the services available for your architecture. But, the purpose of the workload is to provide business value first.
It’s also important to assess your services in context of your holistic workload. Get an understanding of:
- How will this workload be consumed?
- What will the traffic patterns look like?
- What variety of data access is required?
Don’t base your choices solely on performance and cost out of the gate.
Be happy that AWS follows a shared responsibility model! Because it allows you, as a customer to worry less about the heavy lifting of infrastructure. We’re talking security and operations of physical data centers. Even the process of securing the physical premises of a data center can be astronomical. Exponentially so if you’re in a highly-regulated industry. All this means that you can focus on what’s most important. Which is providing value to your customers.
Performance Efficiency Best Practice Areas
To avoid turning this into a thesis-long article, we’ll cover the best practices of the pillar in the next post. But here’s a quick glimpse into the 4 practice areas for Performance Efficiency:
- Selection
- Review
- Monitoring
- Tradeoffs
In a future post, we’ll be looking at each of these best practice areas. The goal is to help you understand how to take a data-driven approach to select technology solutions. And help optimize your workload performance and cost aspects.
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Need Help Today?
If you want to learn more about how the AWS Well-Architected Framework can add value to your business, reach out to us at Autimo. We’ve been going deep on the framework over the last year. As part of this, we created the Autimo Navigate service leveraging the framework and we’ve helped our clients transform their AWS workloads. Identifying risks, highlighting improvements, and building roadmaps to better workloads.
