Is Your AWS Environment Well-Architected? Rackspace Can Help

Having experts review the architecture of your digital platform ensures your organization is receiving maximum business value from that platform.

AWS developed its Well-Architected Framework to help cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient and efficient infrastructure for applications. It also offers customers a consistent way to evaluate those architectures. taking into account technical, financial and operational considerations.

A longtime AWS premier consulting partner, Rackspace is one of just a few dozen companies worldwide certified to perform this review. Since then, we have delivered numerous reviews for our joint customers, with Rackspace and AWS experts sharing our collective wisdom and best practices to ensure you’re receiving full benefit from the AWS platform, based on what we’ve learned designing and operating hundreds of AWS environments globally.

Our review is run by certified solutions architects. The deliverables are clear actionable activities aimed at improving your current state.

[Learn more: 5 Actionable Insights from AWS Well-Architected Reviews]

The Well-Architected Framework is divided into five key pillars :

• Operational excellence – focused on operational aspects, such as provisioning and de-provisioning, to ensure sustained business value and continual improvement.
• Security – focused on protecting your data, systems and assets by performing risk assessments and implementing mitigation strategies. Key security considerations in this pillar include reviewing identity and traceability.
• Reliability – focused on the ability to recover from disruptions and meet scalability demand. This pillar focus on aspects such as self-healing and testing.
• Performance efficiency – focused on the ability to utilize and maintain cloud resources efficiently.
• Cost optimization – focused on where costs can be minimized.

A Well-Architected review examines your current-state environment against these key pillars, but it is also a vehicle to discuss future state options that may benefit your organization, such as serverless or high performance computing. It’s also important to recognize that the Well-Architected review is:

• Not an audit: the review instead serves a unique place in the process of technology improvement.
• Not a way to place blame: Well-Architected is about constant and continual improvement and best practice.
• Not a condemnation of bad design: Solution architecture is as much art as science; there are numerous ways to address requirements.
• Not a long engagement: Well-Architected reviews are measured in days and not weeks.

As a certified practitioner of the Well-Architected Framework, I have seen many customers find genuine value from the review, as it gives them assurances they are using the AWS platform to its greatest extent. If you haven't already done so, I encourage you to reach out to Rackspace to get your AWS Well-Architected review complete today.