Module 9: Cloud Architecture

AWS Academy Cloud Foundations

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Module 9: Cloud Architecture

 Module overview
Topics Activities
• AWS Well-Architected Framework Design
• AWS Well-Architected Framework
Principles
• Reliability and high availability • Interpret AWS Trusted Advisor
Recommendations
• AWS Trusted Advisor

Knowledge check

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This module will address the following topics:

• AWS Well-Architected Framework
• Reliability and high availability
• AWS Trusted Advisor

The module also includes two activities. In one activity, you will be challenged to review an
architecture and evaluate it against the AWS Well-Architected Framework design principles. In
the second activity, you will gain experience interpreting AWS Trusted Advisor recommendations.

Finally, you will be asked to complete a knowledge check that will test your understanding of key
concepts covered in this module.
 Module objectives
After completing this module, you should be able to:
• Describe the AWS Well-Architected Framework, including the six pillars
• Identify the design principles of the AWS Well-Architected Framework
• Explain the importance of reliability and high availability
• Identify how AWS Trusted Advisor helps customers
• Interpret AWS Trusted Advisor recommendations

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After completing this module, you should be able to:

• Describe the AWS Well-Architected Framework, including the six pillars
• Identify the design principles of the AWS Well-Architected Framework
• Explain the importance of reliability and high availability
• Identify how AWS Trusted Advisor helps customers
• Interpret AWS Trusted Advisor recommendations
 Section 1: AWS Well-Architected
Framework
Module 9: Cloud Architecture

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Section 1: AWS Well-Architected Framework

 Architecture: designing and building

Architect

Customer
Structure design (Decision maker) Completed structure
Building crew
(Delivery team)

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Architecture is the art and science of designing and building large structures. Large systems
require architects to manage their size and complexity.

Cloud architects:
• Engage with decision makers to identify the business goal and the capabilities that need
improvement.
• Ensure alignment between technology deliverables of a solution and the business goals.
• Work with delivery teams that are implementing the solution to ensure that the technology
features are appropriate.

Having well-architected systems greatly increases the likelihood of business success.

 What is the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
• A guide for designing infrastructures that are:
✓Secure
✓High-performing
✓Resilient
✓Efficient
• A consistent approach to evaluating and implementing cloud architectures
• A way to provide best practices that were developed through lessons learned
by reviewing customer architectures

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The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a guide that is designed to help you build the most
secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure possible for your cloud applications
and workloads. It provides a set of foundational questions and best practices that can help you
evaluate and implement your cloud architectures. AWS developed the Well-Architected
Framework after reviewing thousands of customer architectures on AWS.
 Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework

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The AWS Well-Architected Framework is organized into six pillars: operational excellence,
security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability. The first five
pillars have been part of the framework since the framework's introduction in 2015. The
sustainability pillar was added as the sixth pillar in 2021 to help organizations learn how to
minimize the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads.

The remainder of this module focuses on the first five pillars (operational excellence, security,
reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization) and leads you through a review of an
example architecture against each pillar's design principles.
For more about the sustainability pillar, refer to the sustainability pillar section within the Well-
Architected Framework documentation see
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/sustainability-pillar/sustainability-
pillar.html.

For accessibility: The pillars include operational excellence, security, reliability, performance
efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability. End of accessibility description.
 Section 1 key • The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides a
consistent approach to evaluate cloud architectures and
takeaways guidance to help implement designs.
• The AWS Well-Architected Framework documents a set
of design principles and best practices that enable you
to understand if a specific architecture aligns well with
cloud best practices.
• The AWS Well-Architected Framework is organized into
six pillars.
• Each pillar includes its own set of design principles and
best practices.

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Some key takeaways from this section of the module include:

• The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides a consistent approach to evaluate cloud
architectures and guidance to help implement designs.
• The AWS Well-Architected Framework documents a set of design principles and best practices
that enable you to understand if a specific architecture aligns well with cloud best practices.
• The AWS Well-Architected Framework is organized into six pillars.
• Each pillar includes its own set of design principles and best practices.
 Section 2: Reliability and availability
Module 9: Cloud Architecture

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Section 2: Reliability and availability

 “Everything fails, all the time.”
Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com

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In the words of Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, “Everything fails, all the time.” One of the best
practices that is identified in the AWS Well-Architected Framework is to plan for failure (or
application or workload downtime). One way to do that is to architect your applications and
workloads to withstand failure. There are two important factors that cloud architects consider
when designing architectures to withstand failure: reliability and availability.
 Reliability

• A measure of your system’s

ability to provide functionality Car
when desired by the user.
• System includes all system
components: hardware,
firmware, and software. Brakes

• Probability that your entire System

Component
system will function as intended Ignition
for a specified period. Cooling System
• Mean time between failures System
Component

(MTBF) = total time in component

service/number of failures
System
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Reliability is a measure of your system’s ability to provide functionality when desired by the user.
Because "everything fails, all the time," you should think of reliability in statistical terms.
Reliability is the probability that an entire system will function as intended for a specified period.
Note that a system includes all system components, such as hardware, firmware, and software.
Failure of system components impacts the availability of the system.

To understand reliability, it is helpful to consider the familiar example of a car. The car is the
system. Each of the car’s components (for example, cooling, ignition, and brakes) must work
together in order for the car to work properly. If you try to start the car and the ignition fails, you
cannot drive anywhere—the car is not available. If the ignition fails repeatedly, your car is not
considered reliable.

A common way to measure reliability is to use statistical measurements, such as Mean Time
Between Failures (MTBF). MTBF is the total time in service over the number of failures.
 Understanding reliability metrics

System brought online

(system available)

Mean Time Between Failures Mean Time to Failure

(MTBF = MTTF + MTTR) (MTTF)

System System
(component) Mean Time to Repair
(component)
repaired (MTTR) fails

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Say that you have an application that you bring online Monday at noon. The application is said to
be available. It functions normally until it fails Friday at noon. Therefore, the time to failure (or
the length of time the application is available) is 96 hours. You spend from Friday at noon until
Monday at noon diagnosing why the application failed and repairing it, at which point you bring
the application back online. Therefore, the time to repair is 72 hours.

Then, it happens again: the application fails on Friday at noon, you spend from Friday at noon
until Monday at noon repairing it, and you bring it online on Monday at noon.

Say this failure-repair-restore cycle happens every week. You can now calculate the average of
these numbers. In this example, your mean time to failure (MTTF) is 96 hours, and your mean
time to repair (MTTR) is 72 hours. Your mean time between failures (MTBF) is 168 hours (or 1
week), which is the sum of MTTF and MTTR.
 Availability
• Normal operation time / total time
• A percentage of uptime (for example, 99.9 percent) over time (for example, 1
year)
• Number of 9s – Five 9s means 99.999 percent availability

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As you just learned, failure of system components impacts the availability of the system.

Formally, availability is the percentage of time that a system is operating normally or correctly
performing the operations expected of it (or normal operation time over total time). Availability
is reduced anytime the application isn’t operating normally, including both scheduled and
unscheduled interruptions.

Availability is also defined as the percentage of uptime (that is, length of time that a system is
online between failures) over a period of time (commonly 1 year).

A common shorthand when referring to availability is number of 9s. For example, five 9s means
99.999 percent availability.
 High availability

• System can withstand some measure of degradation

while still remaining available.
• Downtime is minimized.
• Minimal human intervention is required.

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A highly available system is one that can withstand some measure of degradation while still
remaining available. In a highly available system, downtime is minimized as much as possible and
minimal human intervention is required.

A highly available system can be viewed as a set of system-wide, shared resources that cooperate
to guarantee essential services. High availability combines software with open-standard hardware
to minimize downtime by quickly restoring essential services when a system, component, or
application fails. Services are restored rapidly, often in less than 1 minute.
 Availability tiers

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Availability requirements vary. The length of disruption that is acceptable depends on the type of
application. Here is a table of common application availability design goals and the maximum
length of disruption that can occur within a year while still meeting the goal. The table contains
examples of the types of applications that are common at each availability tier.

For accessibility: Availability tiers with max disruption per year and application categories. The
tiers range from availabilities of 99 percent to 99.999 percent. End of accessibility description.
 Factors that influence availability
Fault tolerance Recoverability
• The built-in redundancy of an • The process, policies, and
application's components and its procedures that are related to
ability to remain operational. restoring service after a
catastrophic event.
Scalability
• The ability of an application to
accommodate increases in
capacity needs without changing
design.

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Though events that might disrupt an application’s availability cannot always be predicted, you
can build availability into your architecture design. There are three factors that determine the
overall availability of your application:
• Fault tolerance refers to the built-in redundancy of an application's components and the
ability of the application to remain operational even if some of its components fail. Fault
tolerance relies on specialized hardware to detect failure in a system component (such as a
processor, memory board, power supply, I/O subsystem, or storage subsystem) and
instantaneously switch to a redundant hardware component. The fault-tolerant model does
not address software failures, which are the most common reason for downtime.
• Scalability is the ability of your application to accommodate increases in capacity needs,
remain available, and perform within your required standards. It does not guarantee
availability, but it contributes to your application's availability.
• Recoverability is the ability to restore service quickly and without lost data if a disaster
makes your components unavailable, or it destroys data.

Keep in mind that improving availability usually leads to increased cost. When you consider
how to make your environment more available, it's important to balance the cost of the
improvement with the benefit to your users.

Do you want to ensure that your application is always alive or reachable, or do you want to
ensure that it is servicing requests within an acceptable level of performance?
 Section 2 key • Reliability is a measure of your system’s ability to
provide functionality when desired by the user, and it
takeaways can be measured in terms of MTBF.
• Availability is the percentage of time that a system is
operating normally or correctly performing the
operations expected of it (or normal operation time
over total time).
• Three factors that influence the availability of your
applications are fault tolerance, scalability, and
recoverability.
• You can design your workloads and applications to be
highly available, but there is a cost tradeoff to consider.

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Some key takeaways from this section of the module include:

• Reliability is a measure of your system’s ability to provide functionality when desired by the
user, and it can be measured in terms of MTBF.
• Availability is the percentage of time that a system is operating normally or correctly
performing the operations expected of it (or normal operation time over total time).
• Three factors that influence the availability of your applications are fault tolerance, scalability,
and recoverability.
• You can design your workloads and applications to be highly available, but there is a cost
tradeoff to consider.
 Section 3: AWS Trusted Advisor
Module 9: Cloud Architecture

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Section 3: AWS Trusted Advisor

As you have learned so far, you can use the AWS Well-Architected Framework as you design your
architectures to understand potential risks in your architecture, identify areas that need
improvement, and drive architectural decisions. In this section, you will learn about AWS Trusted
Advisor, which is a tool that you can use to review your AWS environment as soon as you start
implementing your architectures.
 AWS Trusted Advisor

• Online tool that provides real-time guidance to help you

provision your resources following AWS best practices.
AWS Trusted • Looks at your entire AWS environment and gives you real-time
Advisor recommendations in five categories.
Cost Optimization Performance Security Fault Tolerance Service Limits

Potential monthly savings

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AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides real-time guidance to help you provision
your resources following AWS best practices.

AWS Trusted Advisor looks at your entire AWS environment and gives you recommendations in
five categories:
• Cost Optimization – AWS Trusted Advisor looks at your resource use and makes
recommendations to help you optimize cost by eliminating unused and idle resources, or by
making commitments to reserved capacity.
• Performance – Improve the performance of your service by checking your service limits,
ensuring you take advantage of provisioned throughput, and monitoring for overutilized
instances.
• Security – Improve the security of your application by closing gaps, enabling various AWS
security features, and examining your permissions.
• Fault Tolerance – Increase the availability and redundancy of your AWS application by taking
advantage of automatic scaling, health checks, Multi-AZ deployments, and backup
capabilities.
• Service Limits – AWS Trusted Advisor checks for service usage that is more than 80 percent of
the service limit. Values are based on a snapshot, so your current usage might differ. Limit
and usage data can take up to 24 hours to reflect any changes.

For a detailed description of the information that AWS Trusted Advisor provides, see AWS
Trusted Advisor Best Practice Checks at
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awssupport/latest/user/trusted-advisor-check-reference.html.
 Activity: Interpret AWS Trusted Advisor recommendations

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You have a friend who used AWS Trusted Advisor for the first time. She is trying to interpret its
recommendations to improve her cloud environment and needs your help. This is her dashboard.
While everything looks OK in the cost optimization and service limit categories, you notice that
there are a few recommendations that you should review to help her improve her security,
performance, and fault tolerance.

Help your friend interpret the following recommendations.

 Activity: Recommendation #1

MFA on Root Account

Description: Checks the root account and warns if multi-factor authentication (MFA) is not enabled. For increased
security, we recommend that you protect your account by using MFA, which requires a user to enter a unique
authentication code from their MFA hardware or virtual device when interacting with the AWS console and
associated websites.
Alert Criteria: MFA is not enabled on the root account.
Recommended Action: Log in to your root account and activate an MFA device.

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For this recommendation, answer these questions:

• What is the status?
• What is the problem?
• What specific environment details are you given?
• What is the best practice?
• What is the recommended action?
 Activity: Recommendation #2
IAM Password Policy
Description: Checks the password policy for your account and warns when a password policy is not enabled, or if
password content requirements have not been enabled. Password content requirements increase the overall
security of your AWS environment by enforcing the creation of strong user passwords. When you create or change a
password policy, the change is enforced immediately for new users but does not require existing users to change
their passwords.
Alert Criteria: A password policy is enabled, but at least one content requirement is not enabled.
Recommended Action: If some content requirements are not enabled, consider enabling them. If no password policy
is enabled, create and configure one. See Setting an Account Password Policy for IAM Users.

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For this recommendation, answer these questions:

• What is the status?
• What is the problem?
• What specific environment details are you given?
• What is the best practice?
• What is the recommended action?
 Activity: Recommendation #3

Security Groups – Unrestricted Access

Description: Checks security groups for rules that allow unrestricted access to a resource. Unrestricted access
increases opportunities for malicious activity (hacking, denial-of-service attacks, loss of data).

Alert Criteria: A security group rule has a source IP address with a /0 suffix for ports other than 25, 80, or 443.)

Recommended Action: Restrict access to only those IP addresses that require it. To restrict access to a specific IP
address, set the suffix to /32 (for example, 192.0.2.10/32). Be sure to delete overly permissive rules after creating
rules that are more restrictive.

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For this recommendation, answer these questions:

• What is the status?
• What is the problem?
• What specific environment details are you given?
• What is the best practice?
• What is the recommended action?

For accessibility: Security groups information including Region, security group name, security
group ID, protocol, port, status, and IP range from 2 sample security groups. The status of both is
red. End of accessibility description.
 Activity: Recommendation #4
Amazon EBS Snapshots

Description: Checks the age of the snapshots for your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes
(available or in-use). Even though Amazon EBS volumes are replicated, failures can occur. Snapshots are
persisted to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for durable storage and point-in-time recovery.

Alert Criteria:
Yellow: The most recent volume snapshot is between 7 and 30 days old.
Red: The most recent volume snapshot is more than 30 days old.
Red: The volume does not have a snapshot.

Recommended Action: Create weekly or monthly snapshots of your volumes

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For this recommendation, answer these questions:

• What is the status?
• What is the problem?
• What specific environment details are you given?
• What is the best practice?
• What is the recommended action?

For accessibility: Amazon EBS volume information for Region us-east-1 including volume ID,
volume name, volume attachment, status (listed as red), and reason (listed as no snapshot). End
of accessibility description.
 Activity: Recommendation #5
Amazon S3 Bucket Logging
Description: Checks the logging configuration of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. When server
access logging is enabled, detailed access logs are delivered hourly to a bucket that you choose. An access log record
contains details about each request, such as the request type, the resources specified in the request, and the time
and date the request was processed. By default, bucket logging is not enabled; you should enable logging if you want
to perform security audits or learn more about users and usage patterns.
Alert Criteria:
Yellow: The bucket does not have server access logging enabled.
Yellow: The target bucket permissions do not include the owner account. Trusted Advisor cannot check it.
Recommended Action:
Enable bucket logging for most buckets.
If the target bucket permissions do not include the owner account and you want Trusted Advisor to check the
logging status, add the owner account as a grantee.

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For this recommendation, answer these questions:

• What is the status?
• What is the problem?
• What specific environment details are you given?
• What is the best practice?
• What is the recommended action?

For accessibility: Amazon S3 bucket logging information for Region us-east-2 including bucket
name, target exists (no), same owner (no), write enabled (no), and reason (logging not enabled).
End of accessibility description.
 Section 3 key • AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides real-
time guidance to help you provision your resources by
takeaways following AWS best practices.
• AWS Trusted Advisor looks at your entire AWS
environment and gives you real-time recommendations
in five categories.
• You can use AWS Trusted Advisor to help you optimize
your AWS environment as soon as you start
implementing your architecture designs.

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Some key takeaways from this section of the module include:

• AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides real-time guidance to help you provision
your resources by following AWS best practices.
• AWS Trusted Advisor looks at your entire AWS environment and gives you real-time
recommendations in five categories.
• You can use AWS Trusted Advisor to help you optimize your AWS environment as soon as you
start implementing your architecture designs.
 Module wrap-up
Module 9: Cloud Architecture

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It’s now time to review the module and wrap up the module with a knowledge check and
discussion of a practice certification exam question.
 Module summary
In summary, in this module you learned how to:
• Describe the AWS Well-Architected Framework, including the six pillars
• Identify the design principles of the AWS Well-Architected Framework
• Explain the importance of reliability and high availability
• Identify how AWS Trusted Advisor helps customers
• Interpret AWS Trusted Advisor recommendations

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In summary, in this module you learned how to:

• Describe the AWS Well-Architected Framework, including the six pillars
• Identify the design principles of the AWS Well-Architected Framework
• Explain the importance of reliability and high availability
• Identify how AWS Trusted Advisor helps customers
• Interpret AWS Trusted Advisor recommendations
 Complete the knowledge check

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Now, complete the knowledge check.

 Sample exam question
A SysOps engineer working at a company wants to protect their data in transit and at rest. What services could
they use to protect their data?

Choice Response

A Elastic Load Balancing

B Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS)

C Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

D All of the above

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Look at the answer choices and rule them out based on the keywords.
 Sample exam question answer
A SysOps engineer working at a company wants to protect their data in transit and at rest. What services could
they use to protect their data?

The correct answer is D.

The keywords in the question are “protect their data in transit and at rest”.

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The following are the keywords to recognize are: “protect their data in transit and at rest.”

The correct answer is D.

 Additional resources
• AWS Well-Architected website: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-
architected/?wa-lens-whitepapers.sort-
by=item.additionalFields.sortDate&wa-lens-whitepapers.sort-order=desc
• AWS Well-Architected Labs: https://wellarchitectedlabs.com/
• AWS Trusted Advisor Best Practice Checks:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awssupport/latest/user/trusted-advisor-
check-reference.html

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If you want to learn more about the topics covered in this module, you might find the following
additional resources helpful:
• AWS Well-Architected website: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/?wa-
lens-whitepapers.sort-by=item.additionalFields.sortDate&wa-lens-whitepapers.sort-
order=desc
• AWS Well-Architected Labs: https://wellarchitectedlabs.com/
• AWS Trusted Advisor Best Practice Checks:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awssupport/latest/user/trusted-advisor-check-reference.html.
 Thank you

Corrections, feedback, or other questions?

Contact us at https://support.aws.amazon.com/#/contacts/aws-academy.
All trademarks are the property of their owners.

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Thank you for completing this module.