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Month: October 2021

How AWS Can Help You Prepare For Problems

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a comprehensive cloud computing services platform that provides technologies to enable businesses to improve through its five pillars of Well-Architected Framework: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization.

At WOLK, we have a team of AWS experts who can help your business smoothly transition IT to the cloud. All our projects begin with a Well-Architected Review, giving clients a clear indication of what framework is best suited to their needs.

Whatever your workload, AWS can help prepare a business for potential problems through the first pillar: Operational Excellence.

The First Pillar: Operational Excellence
Within the first pillar, there are four key focuses for operational excellence: organisation, prepare, operate, evolve. Through this pillar, AWS helps businesses develop, run workloads, understand insights, and consistently improve the actions that add value to a business.

A major part of fulfilling the operational excellence pillar is preparing for problems so your team members can deal with them quickly and efficiently. By performing exercises that identify potential issues before they occur, you can mitigate them. AWS can test workloads to probe problems.

AWS does this in three steps:

1. Design
AWS helps you design your workload so you can fully understand each area’s performance. You can do this through metrics or logged data. AWS services, such as data analytics programs, can then be used to record and transfer performance information, allowing you to track progress.

2. Adopt
By designing a system that provides fast feedback, you can subsequently act quicker to prepare or prevent problems you foresee. AWS can help you create and adopt effective troubleshooting measures to reduce the impact of any problems.

AWS allows users to access their entire workload in the form of code. This makes it safe and easy to develop and adopt processes to deal with or reduce problems. For example, CloudFormation uses sandbox development to test and adopt infrastructure to give users more operational control.

3. Evaluate
Workloads and processes must be continuously evaluated to determine problematic areas. You can implement AWS to use runbooks that log routine procedures, evaluate them, and find solutions to mitigate problems.

Identify and Prepare For Problems Using AWS
WOLK is a certified provider of AWS Well-Architected Framework reviews. We can work alongside your business to help you identify and prepare for potential problems, leading to continued optimisation within your systems while avoiding unwanted roadblocks.

Educating Your Teams Through AWS

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a fantastic tool but must be fully understood by all team members to be as effective as possible.

AWS Support offers a variety of options to help educate your teams about the Well-Architected Framework.

AWS Knowledge Center
The AWS Knowledge Center compiles FAQs for many of Amazon’s most popular web services. If your teams are unsure about certain aspects of AWS, they should start with the Knowledge Center.

AWS offers services from security to cloud services, to messaging. Before delving into the Well-Architected Framework’s specifics, the Knowledge Center can help your team members get a feel for what AWS is all about.

AWS Documentation
For more specific details about the Well-Architected Framework, including information about each pillar and how to best achieve them, have your team members visit the AWS Documentation pages.

They include whiteboard pages with a general overview of the Framework, as well as detailed descriptions of each of the five pillars.

There are also helpful answers to FAQs that your teams might have about specific best practices.

AWS Compliance
Compliance with the Framework is vital to ensuring your company runs as smoothly as possible. To educate your teams on how to achieve and maintain compliance, direct them to the AWS Compliance page.

There, they can find guides on specific compliance actions and handbooks focusing on particular areas of the Framework.

AWS Discussions
If a member of your team has a question that is too specific for general FAQs and guidebooks, post the question at AWS Discussions. In this forum, your team members can interact with AWS staff and other users of the Well-Architected Framework.

Your team member might find their answer faster through the AWS Discussions page, especially for narrow or unusual questions.

AWS Training and Certification
To ensure your team is entirely secure in their knowledge of the Well-Architected Framework, consider signing them up for courses through the AWS Training and Certification page.

Particularly for team leads or pivotal team members who work closely with the Framework, a training course can provide stability. Once trained, these team members can answer questions and offer more in-house support.

Work with a Well-Architected Partner
Even after thoroughly educating your team on how to use the Well-Architected Framework, it can be beneficial to check your compliance through a Well-Architected Review.

WOLK is an experienced, knowledgeable partner and can help you to ensure compliance.

How to Optimise Your Spend and Take Control of Cost With AWS

Cost Optimisation is the fifth pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework , and it focuses on enabling businesses to operate at the lowest cost while delivering high value to their customers. Through AWS, businesses can develop workloads to optimise investment spend, giving them maximum returns.

The cost optimisation pillar uses five core design principles and five best practices to guide organizations on how they can make the most of cloud services and take control over their finances.

Five Design Principles of Cost Optimisation

1. Implement Cloud Financial Management
Cloud financial management systems are essential when handling business costs. By building knowledge, suitable financial programs, and value-driven processes through AWS, your business can achieve cost efficiency.

Programs such as Cost Explorer can help an organisation track spend across all departments. AWS Budgets may be programmed to send notifications regarding cost control.

2. Adopt a Consumption Model
This involves using only the AWS programs you need and adjusting usage depending on actual requirements. This practice avoids the use of expensive and unnecessary forecasting to determine computing requirements.

3. Measure Overall Efficiency
Take control of your spending by measuring output levels and costs of each workload, then analyzing the data to find savings opportunities. AWS analytical programs can be used to measure this.

4. Stop Spending Your Money on Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting
Let AWS control complex tasks such as data operations and server management. With fully optimised AWS systems replacing expensive manual operations, your team can focus on core competencies and important projects.

5. Analyse and Attribute Expenditure
AWS cloud systems can provide accurate information regarding usage and costs within your organisation. This allows you to allocate expenditure to specific workloads to achieve monetary goals.

Five Best Practices of Cost Optimisation
Coinciding with the design pillars there are five best practices to ensure businesses gain control of their financial situation.

1. Practice Cloud Financial Management
This aligns with the first design principle, and involves organising your business to meet financial goals, through effective cloud financial management systems.

2. Expenditure and Usage Awareness
Using AWS services, like AWS Organisations or AWS Control Tower, businesses can break down and organise expenditure and usage. This helps them to manage resources more efficiently.

3. Cost-Effective Resources
A major advantage of using AWS is the cost, since it offers many cost-effective resources that can replace existing manual systems.

4. Manage Demand and Supply Resources
With AWS, you only pay for the programs that you use, giving you maximum control over expenditure on resources.

5. Optimise Over Time
AWS continually releases new services, allowing users to upgrade and progress constantly. Businesses should review existing architectural structures regularly to determine if further optimisation is needed.

Work With WOLK Today
To gain control of your costs and to optimise spending and investment, get in touch with WOLK. As a certified AWS Well-Architected Framework reviewer, we can operate alongside your business to help achieve your financial goals.

Improving Operational Readiness Through AWS

Operational Readiness is vital for your company’s continued growth and productivity levels. Using the AWS Well-Architected Framework, you can maintain and improve your level of operational readiness.

Operational Readiness Review
The AWS Well-Architected Framework recommends scheduling regular reviews to test the operational readiness of your workload, applications, processes, procedures and teams.

Through this review, you can make sure everything in your company is running smoothly, and any new workloads are ready to go live. Regular inspections also allow you to catch recently developed risks and fix them before going live, rather than having to backtrack.

Viewing your Workload as Code
The Well-Architected Framework allows you to view your entire workload as code, including your applications, infrastructure, policies, governance and operations.

Translating everything into code allows you to reduce or even eliminate human error.

Prepare: An Operational Excellence Best Practice
Prepare your workload. Have a clear idea of what your end goal is, and exactly how your workloads and applications will achieve it.

When designing your workload, be sure to include the ability for self-reporting. It helps your teams to easily and quickly access all the information they need.

Create a consistent process to use during every Operational Review. You can compare results directly if you maintain the same test environment.

Best Practices to Improve Your Operational Readiness
Use version controlled repositories within your workload to track changes, distribute new versions, detect changes, and quickly reverse changes. In case of a failure, integrated version control allows you to return to an earlier edition of the code or procedure.

Test and validate all changes, even the small ones. By testing at every step, you can identify any problem before it creates havoc. Automate the testing to mitigate human error.

Ensure design standards are the same for all teams. Standard designs, operating practices, checklists and rules make it easier to review your operational readiness across the whole company.

Automation
Automate as much as possible, including configuration management, patch management, and build and deploy systems.

Automation allows testing at precise, regular intervals makes changes easier to implement and reduces the amount of effort needed from your team.

Change How you Make Changes
An essential part of the Operational Excellence pillar is making frequent, small, and reversible changes. In addition to helping your overall workload, this concept also improves your operational readiness.

Compliance with AWS Well-Architected Framework Guidelines
The best way to improve your operational readiness is to comply with all the guidelines in the Well-Architected Framework. WOLK can help you by performing a Well-Architected Review.

After WOLK highlights any high-risk items and remediates them, you can continue to improve your operational readiness by using the AWS Well-Architected Framework.