Category: AWS Well-Architected

Networking and AWS: What You Need to Know to Improve Overall Performance

The AWS Well-Architected Program centres around five pillars comprising operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimisation. Where reliability is concerned, managing your network is essential to the continued performance standard of your business.

For architecting systems using IP address-based networks, it’s necessary to build your network system to anticipate possible issues down the line. The Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) makes it possible to launch your AWS services in a private virtual network for added security.

Direct Connect
AWS Direct Connect is a cloud-based service that allows a secure connection from your physical system to AWS via a network. By utilising the AWS Virtual Private Cloud, you can connect your on-site data to different AWS regions.

A few questions to ask yourself when preparing your network for maximum efficiency are:

● How are you going to protect yourself against failures of network elements?
● What happens if there are configuration or connectivity issues?
● Can your network handle fluctuations in traffic?
● Can you combat a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack if it occurs?

A secure network is key to improving overall performance with AWS.

Network and Workloads
Your network is the bridge between all workloads, guiding traffic, which can significantly impact your efficiency and client experience. Understanding your workload needs regarding bandwidth, latency, and other technical communications is critical to increasing performance.

AWS delivers virtual networking, making it flexible and accessible in a way that can meet your specific needs. By targeting your network to your system’s performance demands, you will maximise your reliability and performance efficiency.

A cloud-based network’s benefit is that it is easy to change over time as your organisation’s needs evolve. Where you choose to deploy your resources can also impact the efficiency of performance. Ideally, if you know where the resources will be in use, the majority of the time, you can choose to set them up in a way that reduces the distance, eliminating a host of issues with the delay. Take advantage of your resources with deliberate decisions to design an improved performance model.

Improve Performance With a Review
To maximise your overall performance, schedule an AWS Well-Architected Review. WOLK is certified to perform this action and provide information on your risk areas. By identifying these areas, measures can be carried out to ensure they do not jeopardise your network’s efficiency.

6 Ways AWS Can Help You Evaluate and Manage New System Costs

The fifth pillar of AWS is cost optimisation which focuses on ensuring you don’t spend more than you need to. This principle also applies to cost analyses of new services.

Choosing the correct service can make a significant difference in your overall costs. Amazon offers many services at varying price points that can increase your reliability and performance efficiency, improve your security and help you achieve operational excellence.

However, it’s essential to ensure achieving the first four pillars doesn’t overwhelm your budget. The Well-Architected Framework has six best practices that can help you evaluate new services for cost and efficiency.

1. Identify Organisation Requirements
You should identify your organisation’s requirements for each of the five pillars of the Well-Architected Framework. Work with your team members in product management, applications, development and operations, management and finance.

Determine what your requirements are in terms of each pillar, weighing them to find the balance between cost and the other pillars.

2. Break Down Your Workload
Break down your workload into components and analyse the cost and importance of each one individually. Include all parts, even the small or old ones.

Prioritise your components by cost and importance to prepare for the analysis.

3. Analyse The Components
Work your way down the list of components, only moving on after you have completed a thorough analysis.

For the high priority components, also analyse the options that could improve them. Determine how much they would cost, how much they would benefit the component, and what their long-term impact would be.

For lower priority components, determine what if any improvements you could implement, and if those improvements would push the component into the high priority category.

4. Find Cost-Effective Licensing
First, look into open-source software to eliminate licensing costs. Amazon has several options, like Amazon Linux or Amazon Aurora. If you can’t find appropriate open-source software, choose software bound to output or outcomes. Instead of paying per CPU, you will only be paying for what you use.

Check the historical prices of the provider to see if they regularly increase or have remained stable. You want to ensure that this software will stay within your budget in the future.

5. Select Your Components
Once you’ve finished analysing, you can select your components. Be sure to prioritise the cost analysis when making your final choices.

6. Perform Cost Analysis
Regularly perform a cost analysis of your workload, since it can change over time.

As your workload grows, you might want to bring on more managed services like Amazon RDS or Amazon DynamoDB that will reduce your overhead and enable you to focus on other aspects of your business.

Work With an AWS Partner
If you want help analysing services, an AWS Partner like WOLK can help you with your cost analysis and ensure your company is compliant with the Well-Architected Framework.

How AWS Can Assist in Managing Demand and Supply Cost Effectively

Cost optimisation, the fifth and final pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, contains guidelines that allow you to deliver your products at the lowest price point. You can lower your costs and increase your productivity by working in the cloud.

The cloud also allows you to pay only for what you need, when you need it, giving you the flexibility to pare down or amp up. To ensure that your workload is balanced, follow these best practices.

Analyse the Workload Demands
First, you need to know what your current workload demands are. Do a complete analysis of your workload. Use current and past data, and look at your customer logs to see how customers usually interact with your workload.

Be sure to include a complete cycle’s worth of data. If you have a busy or slow season, you’ll need to change your supply accordingly.

AWS suggests that you use the actual demand in requests per second, when the rate of demand changes, and the rate of change of the demand as your metrics.

You should also forecast outside influences by meeting with the marketing, sales or business development team. They can tell you about upcoming events that might increase or lower demands.

Manage Demand with a Buffer or Throttle
If there are sudden jumps in demand, a buffer or throttle can help to smooth them out, enabling your workload to function normally. If a client retries, you’ll want to use a throttle. Buffering allows you to store the request and process it later.

Ensure that you always process your buffered requests within the expected time scale. You can use Amazon Simple Queue Service to implement buffering and Amazon API Gateway for throttling.

Dynamically Supply Resources
You can supply resources using either a time-scale or an auto-scale. For some businesses, a combination of both approaches works best.

Use time-based scheduling when you have a steady, even demand. If you know that the demand will rise or fall on a specific date, you can schedule your supply to increase at that time.

Auto-scaling scheduling works better with more unpredictable levels of demands. You can configure your systems to automatically detect a change in demand and an increase or decrease in supply.

Use AWS Auto-Scaling to configure both types of scheduling.

Work with an AWS Partner
If you aren’t confident about your workload analysis or want to confirm that you are operating within the guidelines of the Well-Architected Framework, consult with an AWS Partner like WOLK to learn more and highlight areas of non-compliance.

How to Improve Awareness of Expenditures and Usage with AWS

The fifth pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework is cost optimisation, which is about lowering your price point.

Working in the cloud gives you more flexibility and creates more opportunities for innovation. You no longer need to manually research new hardware, purchase new hardware, schedule shipments, or process shipping orders. You can create systems to do all of that automatically.

However, the way you monitor expenditures and usages will have to change. Several AWS programs can help you improve your awareness and monitor your expenses and usage.

Accurate Cost Attribution
You need to know the exact cost of each department or product owner. This knowledge will give you insight into which products are more profitable, and which are losing money.

Use AWS Organisations or AWS Control Tower to separate your teams and products by costs and usage. These programs have several organisational options, including tagging to enable sorting by category, team name, business name, or other information.

Cost Attribution Categories
You want to create organisation categories and functional categories to sort your costs.

To determine your organisation categories, meet with your stakeholders and follow your existing organisational structure. You might want to include topics like budget, department, or business unit.

The functional categories might include topics like your workload name, and areas of focus in the business (production, shipping, etc.).

There is no limit to the number of categories one item can have. Be as detailed as possible when defining your categories.

Establish Organisational Metrics
You should clearly state what the workload outcomes are. Use business outcomes to determine the metrics. For example, the number of web pages served to customers could be a workload metric.

If your workload is large or complicated, consider breaking your metrics down for each component.

Billing and Cost Management Tools
AWS provides several tools that aid in billing and cost management. Train representatives of each team that works with an application in AWS Budgets and AWS Cost Explorer.

Use Workload Metrics
Use your workload metrics to allocate your costs. You can use Amazon Athena to create an efficiency dashboard, making it easy to evaluate your cost efficiency regularly.

Consult an AWS Partner
If you are new to AWS or want to confirm that you are following all the guidelines, a Well-Architected Review can help. WOLK is an experienced long-term AWS Partner and can check for high-risk items and mitigate them for you to ensure you’re operating as efficiently as possible.

Monitoring Performance Efficiency Under AWS

AWS Well-Architected Framework uses five operational pillars to implement best practices that allow cloud-based systems to function efficiently. These five pillars are operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimisation. Designing cloud-based systems that operate using these five core principles is what sets the AWS Well-Architected Framework apart.

Monitoring Performance
Monitoring the performance of a workload using alerts for immediate notification of inefficiency or security breaches is the most effective way to ensure clients aren’t impacted.

Avoiding human error by creating automated notification of system degradation reduces the amount of time it takes to fix a problem. It’s essential to schedule a time to test your alert system through simulated breaches. Doing so ensures your monitoring is working correctly.

Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service that can provide you with tangible results when it comes to your system. It includes data and information about your workload while helping you respond to inefficiencies. By getting information about the cause of problems within your cloud-based system, you can better manage your response approach.

Four Phases of Monitoring
Monitoring is also an integral part of the third pillar of AWS, reliability. There are four phases to monitoring with AWS:

1. Generation
Monitoring the workload can be done using Amazon CloudWatch or another tool. Make use of the vast amount of data and log information available to understand how the cloud functions as it changes to meet current demand.

2. Aggregation
Be specific in calculations in regards to data logs and filters. Data is forwarded to CloudWatch logs when you use Amazon CloudWatch as your monitoring service.

3. Real-time processing and alarming
The system recognizes threats in real-time and sends out notifications to your organization to take immediate action. Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) can forward the alert to multiple users so that technical staff can be alerted that there is a problem.

4. Storage and analytics
Analyze the logs and files collected for trends to get a better sense of your workload. Data management can’t be overlooked, and Amazon CloudWatch is a powerful tool for analyzing your data.

It’s necessary to schedule regular reviews that look at how your monitoring service is working to perform updates for improved security and efficiency. Your business priorities should drive the way you monitor.

Get an AWS Well-Architected Review
WOLK is a proud partner of the AWS Well-Architected Program and is certified to perform your system inspections. Contact us to schedule a review that will highlight issues in your cloud-based system that need resolving.

Selecting Storage Solutions Under AWS

Storage is an essential part of cloud usage, holding the information of your workload. Cloud storage is a more secure way to keep data safe than traditional physical servers kept on site. With the cloud, you have the flexibility to access your information from different regions and migrate it to a new location should you need to do so.

AWS Storage Solutions
AWS offers three types of storage solutions to meet your needs:

1. Object Storage
Object storage is designed for exceptional durability to access data from any location. This is an ideal storage method for backups or data recovery, with Amazon Simple Storage Solution platform leading the industry in security and performance.

2. Block Storage
Block storage is low latency (minimal delay) storage that is reliable through its consistency. This storage solution is comparable to direct-attached storage (DAS) or Storage Area Network (SAN). You can make workloads easy to access with Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS).

3. File Storage
This solution allows a team to access storage from different systems with permission. Ideal for user home directories or media storage, Amazon Elastic File System is one example of AWS File Storage.

Factors to Consider
Choosing the best storage method for your system depends on various factors. How frequently will it be accessed? Will it be online and used all the time, or will it be used for archival purposes? It’s also important to consider how frequently your system will be updated and its durability limitations. The AWS Well-Architected Systems use multiple storage solutions to maximise your productivity and keep costs useful.

Storage and AWS Pillars
AWS Well-Architected Framework operates based on five pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimisation. Storage falls under the fourth pillar, performance efficiency, by taking a data-driven approach to building digital architecture. It is vital to regularly review your selections for storage to make sure you’re maximising your potential as the cloud continues to evolve.

Contact WOLK for a Review
Schedule a well-architected review with WOLK, a certified leading partner of AWS Well-Architected Framework. The review process highlights deficiencies in your system and then executes a remediation process to address those issues. Maintaining an efficient performance is only achievable by assessing how well your system’s various elements work together daily. Responding quickly to security threats, performance problems, or costly outcomes keeps systems operating at their best.

The AWS Sustainability Pillar: An Overview of Best Practices

Although Sustainability is the newest of the six AWS Well-Architected pillars, it is equally as important as the other five. Properly incorporating sustainability into your cloud-based business requires following the best sustainability practices. Here’s an overview of the best practices for compliance with AWS Sustainability.

The Six Types of Best Practices

The recommendations and best practices for implementing sustainability fall into six broad topics:

● Region selection
● User behaviour patterns
● Software and architecture patterns
● Data patterns
● Hardware patterns
● Development and deployment process

1. Region selection

Amazon operates an array of AWS data centers worldwide in 26 different regions and 84 availability zones.

One of the best first steps to implement sustainability with your cloud business is to select one of the AWS regions closest to renewable energy projects, such as on-site solar power or wind farms.

2. User behaviour patterns

Tracking and monitoring your users’ workloads and resource consumption habits is one of the best ways to monitor your business’s energy consumption and determine whether you are meeting your sustainability goals.

Adapting to user behaviour patterns includes identifying and assessing your underused or unused assets, scaling your infrastructure to match your users’ needs precisely, and optimising your users’ hardware and resources.

3. Software and architecture patterns

The way your software is built plays a prominent role in its sustainability. Optimisation plans such as load smoothing, component refactoring, and identifying and optimising the most resource-intensive codebases help reduce resource consumption.

4. Data patterns

Data management and storage protocols are also essential for compliance with Sustainability standards. It isn’t enough to optimise your software; your data lifecycle is equally essential.

Sustainable policies and good practices include the following:

● Data classification and prioritisation
● Periodic removal of unneeded, redundant, and obsolete data
● Utilising shared file systems like Amazon Elastic File System
● Minimisation of data movement between networks

5. Hardware patterns

Good hardware management practices help consume less energy and increase compliance with the Sustainability pillar. One of the most common guidelines is to use no more than the minimum hardware for your needs.

Other good practices include prioritising instance types with the least impact and GPU usage optimisation. For example, you should only use GPU power for tasks that need it, such as rendering.

6. Development and deployment process

Sustainable product development practices range from adopting DevOps philosophies to more practical measures, such as keeping all of your workload elements up to date (operating systems, programming libraries, applications, etc.) or using device farms to test the sustainability of your development processes.

Develop Sustainably With an AWS Partner

WOLK Technology is a team of Amazon Web Services experts that can help you migrate to the cloud and ensure your business complies with AWS sustainability standards. Contact us today for more information.

Our company’s Sustainability journey:
How AWS Sustainability can help

Sustainability is the sixth pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Adopting a sustainability strategy and following the AWS Sustainability standards and best practices brings numerous benefits. However, navigating these standards can be challenging without expert help.

Working with an experienced AWS Partner can help you meet these standards and reap the benefits without disrupting your operations or compromising your security.

The principles of AWS Sustainability

Although moving out of locally managed data centers in favour of the cloud is generally beneficial for emissions and cost-effectiveness, using Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides the most benefits.

The company’s commitment to carbon emissions reduction has resulted in making Sustainability the sixth pillar of the Well-Architected Framework in December 2021. The Sustainability pillar integrates resource management, waste reduction, and environmental impact awareness into its development philosophy.

Benefits of AWS Sustainability

According to a 451 Research study commissioned by Amazon, moving away from standard enterprise infrastructure and toward AWS cloud-based solutions results in a 88% reduction in carbon emissions. AWS infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy-efficient than the average American locally-managed data center.

Even the top 10% of most energy-efficient organisations would benefit from a significant reduction (72% on average) in carbon emissions. Additionally, technological advances in renewable energies and the increasing prevalence of renewable energy solutions, such as solar farms and wind farms, indicate that carbon savings will only increase over time.

Amazon estimates that operations and infrastructure will be 100% renewable-powered by 2025 and reach net-zero emissions by 2040. This means that all companies using AWS will benefit from these sustainability efforts.

How to become AWS Sustainability compliant

Although Amazon’s efforts to improve the sustainability of its services provide passive benefits to all customers that have migrated to AWS, the customer also plays an active role under the principle of Shared Responsibility. While Amazon is responsible for the sustainability of the cloud’s infrastructure, the customer is responsible for using the services as sustainably and efficiently as possible.

Becoming compliant with AWS Sustainability standards is primarily about following a concept known as Energy-Proportional Computing: Resource usage awareness and optimisation, maximising the usage of existing instances and services, consolidating underused ones, and eliminating idle or unused services.

Work with an experienced AWS partner today

At WOLK Technology, your sustainability journey is also ours. Our team of Amazon Web Services experts can help you analyse your company’s AWS service usage, find inefficiencies and carbon-intensive services, and help you streamline your company’s energy consumption without reducing your workload capabilities or compromising security. Contact us today for more information.

VIDEO SERIES – Is disaster recovery only for the big end of town?

In this educational series video, Wolk’s CEO goes into exactly what a Well Architected Review is and how it can benefit your business. The best part? For many, a Well Architected Review can be a cost neutral exercise that saves you big in the long run.

“Disaster recovery is only for the big end of town” – This couldn’t be less true. At the end of the day, down time is bad… and costly no matter the size of your business.

Work With an Experienced AWS Partner
WOLK Technology understands better than anyone else that today’s workflows must perform as expected around the clock, without interruptions. For this reason, we offer tailored solutions to help ensure your AWS business is secure, reliable, and free of unnecessary risks. Contact us today for more information.

AWS and Sustainability: Helping the Cloud Go Green

In 2021, Amazon introduced a new pillar to the core five of the AWS Well-Architected Framework: Sustainability. This new pillar helps businesses and customers improve the environmental impact of their workloads and usage of cloud services through what Amazon refers to as the Shared Responsibility Model of Cloud Sustainability.

According to Amazon, this model reduces energy usage by up to 80%, with plans to depend entirely on renewable energy sources by 2025. Here’s how the Sustainability pillar helps the cloud go green and how the Shared Responsibility Model works.

Essential Principles of the Shared Responsibility Model of Cloud Sustainability

The Shared Responsibility Model of Cloud Sustainability is an application of Amazon’s Shared Responsibility Model from the point of view of the Sustainability pillar. Amazon and the customer share different responsibilities for sustainability and efficiency in many of the same ways as security and data protection.

Under this model, Amazon is responsible for the sustainability and environmental impact of the cloud, whereas the customer is responsible for sustainability in the cloud. The distinction is critical, as it summarises who holds which roles.

AWS Responsibilities

The phrase “sustainability of the cloud” refers to Amazon’s role in maintaining efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally sustainable cloud infrastructure. Amazon is responsible for the following:

● Server and hardware maintenance
● Efficient and environmentally friendly cooling solutions
● Building and maintaining infrastructure to house data centers
● Management of basic utilities at data center locations such as water, power, and waste

Amazon’s role is to build, maintain, and ensure the proper operation of the buildings and hardware supporting cloud computing networks, using renewable energy and resources. According to a joint Amazon-451 Research study, an AWS data centre is 3.6x more energy efficient than the average data center.

Customer Responsibilities

Although the customer is not responsible for the underlying hardware and platforms, their role regarding compliance with the Sustainability pillar is primarily centered around efficient and sustainable utilisation of their resources.

The customer is responsible for the following:

● Sustainable data design and usage
● Efficient software application design
● Proper deployment and scaling of their platforms
● Efficient utilisation of data storage
● High code efficiency; lean, fast, and reliable code is more sustainable than heavy and complex code

It is up to the customer to identify their utilisation metrics and optimise accordingly. For example, a sustainability compliance program can help you find idling and over-utilised instances, enable instance hibernation when not in use, identify wasteful user behaviour patterns, or determine whether to scale up or down.

Optimise Your Business With a Trusted AWS Partner

At WOLK, we aim to provide efficient and sustainable IT solutions with Amazon Web Services. Partner with us and take advantage of our Well-Architected Review to ensure your business complies with all sustainability best practices.