Author: Wayne Hayes

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.

How to Use AWS to Identify Resource Waste

The fifth and final pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, Cost Optimisation, helps businesses ensure they use their resources effectively. By following its five best practices, you can optimise your expenses and expenditures, saving you money, time, and resources.

Cost Optimisation: Best Practices
Two of the best practices included in the Cost Optimisation pillar are improving your awareness of your expenditures and usage and finding cost-effective resources. By ensuring you use the most cost-effective options available, you can reduce your resource waste.

Improving Awareness of Expenditures and Usages
AWS can help you track your expenditures and usages through cost allocation tags. Categorise and tag different resources using your own tag names. Many companies use categories like owners, names of workloads, or names of cost centres to organise their tags.

Once you have tagged your resources, you can use AWS to create a report that tells you your cost and usage. Depending on your needs, you may want to use AWS Cost Explorer or Amazon QuickSight and Amazon Athena to create a more in-depth analysis or to receive reports daily.

If you use these regular reports in addition to tracking the lifecycle of a project or the history of an employee, you can see which areas, projects, or employees no longer generate revenue for your company.

Finding Cost-Effective Resources
Besides analysing your AWS reports and identifying resource waste, you can also use the AWS Cost Optimisation pillar to help you replace wasteful resources with cost-effective ones.

Cost-effective resources are not always the cheapest option. Sometimes, a more expensive resource takes less time or accomplishes the task more efficiently, making it a better choice in the long run.

Because AWS allows you to select only the services you require, you can save on costs while also using a top-of-the-line cloud service. Additionally, many AWS services allow you to pay by usage, which means you don’t pay for services you didn’t use.

When selecting your services, consider their efficiency and their cost compared to your needs. You should also consider whether using an automated service can reduce your overhead when compared to using personnel.

Optimise Your Costs With AWS and WOLK
As a long-time Partner with the AWS Well-Architected Program, WOLK can review your workloads and organisation to ensure you comply with all five pillars, including cost optimisation. If we find an issue, like a problem with your tags or an ineffective use of your resources, we can provide solutions to help your business optimise costs and grow.

Contact us today to schedule a free initial consultation and learn how WOLK can help you.

Evolving Your Operations Through AWS

Use the AWS Well-Architected Framework to evolve your operations and ensure your company can take on new challenges.

Operational Excellence, the first pillar of the Well-Architected Framework, prioritises the ability to evolve your code and organisation so you can learn from failure.

Best Practice: Evolve
To evolve the effectiveness and efficiency of your business, the Well-Architected Framework suggests continually making small adjustments.

Instead of having a yearly review and making sweeping and possibly expensive changes, have a team who is constantly evaluating your workload, applications and organisation to ensure it’s operating at peak efficiency.

Continuous Improvement
Using post-incident analysis, determine what went wrong and outline steps to ensure the same mistakes don’t occur again. Make all teams aware of the problem, and search all areas of your organisation for similar problem areas.

Feedback loops can identify problem areas before they become incidents. Have your evaluation team monitor all feedback loops and alert relevant team leaders when the outcomes fall flat against the predicted baselines.

Knowledge Management
Create an information structure with current, updated information that all team members can access. Also, make it clear when the data needs to be updated or archived.

It’s vital that your organisation only uses current information. Outdated or inaccurate information can cause severe problems for your company and your customers.

Drivers for Improvement
What exactly do you want to improve, and is it possible? Before discussing desired improvements, confirm that your workload supports them.

There are three types of improvements: desired capabilities, unacceptable issues, and compliance requirements.

Desired capabilities can be anything you want to improve in your company. If they aren’t immediately possible, have your team slowly refine your operations and applications in the correct direction.

Address unacceptable issues as soon as possible. They can include security gaps and bugs that slow down your production.

Compliance requirements for AWS change occasionally. Work with a Well-Architected Framework Partner to check your operations are compliant and to identify any High-Risk Items.

Validate Insights and Share Information
Confirm your insights and decisions with outside experts. Fresh eyes can sometimes find problems your company missed.

Don’t forget to document and share all new information and insights with your whole company. Even if the information seems irrelevant to some teams, as your structure evolves, it may become relevant in the future.

Schedule an AWS Well-Architected Review
To evolve your operations through AWS, schedule a Well-Architected Review with WOLK. Keep your company up to date and successful by continuously improving and developing using the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Importance of Reliability For Cloud Services

For any business using cloud computing to operate, reliability is crucial. Malfunctioning or poorly built apps, programs, and other software can lead to a loss of productivity. This can have a knock-on effect, resulting in reduced profits and a diminished reputation among consumers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) uses a five-pillar Well-Architected framework to help businesses develop cloud-based workloads.

The Third Pillar: Reliability
The reliability pillar uses its five design principles to help businesses create workloads that can perform optimally and consistently throughout their entire lifecycle. These design principles lay the foundations for reliable cloud services.

Automatically Recover from Failure
Every company should set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor the effectiveness of each system. If kept in line with the goals of the business, KPIs can quickly determine if there is a problem with a particular workload.

You can put AWS systems in place to engage automatic recovery processes if failures occur. While the reliability of software is important, reliable recovery systems are vital.

Test Recovery Procedures
In many scenarios, businesses don’t use testing for recovery strategies. With AWS, you can test areas of failure within a workload before deciding on the best recovery procedures to adopt. By realising potential problems, you can test and resolve them before a genuine failure scenario happens.

Scale Horizontally to Increase Aggregate Workload Availability
Horizontal scaling involves replacing a large singular resource with several smaller ones. This makes individual workload failures less impactful. With no common point of failure, each system is more reliable.

Stop Guessing Capacity
Over demanding from workloads is a frequent cause of failure. Through AWS systems, businesses can closely monitor the correlation between workload demands and the optimal utilisation of resources. This limits over or under capacitation, resulting in more reliable workloads.

Manage Change in Automation
Automated processes can be tracked, monitored, and reviewed, increasing their reliability. Adjustments are quicker and easier to make than with manual-based systems.

Best Practice Areas for Reliability
In the AWS framework, there are four best practice areas for reliability. From establishing reliable foundations through installing adequate network bandwidth to implementing fast and effective failure management and recovery systems, best practices are essential for reliable cloud services.

The four best practice areas are:

● Foundations
● Workload Architecture
● Change Management
● Failure Management

Increase the Reliability of Your Cloud Services With AWS
At WOLK, we can help you engage with the AWS reliability pillar design principles and best practices to create reliable systems and workloads. Our expert team is a certified AWS Well-Architected Framework review provider so we can guide you through the process from start to finish.

Contact WOLK today to arrange a review.

AWS and Operational Excellence: Organisational Best Practices

The AWS Well-Architected Framework exists to help businesses make their applications and workloads as efficient and secure as possible. It consists of five pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimisation.

The First Pillar

Operational excellence is the first pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. In addition to making sure your workload and applications run smoothly, operational excellence also focuses on making small and reversible changes and dealing with failure.

Operational excellence includes four best practice areas, which are organisation, preparation, operation and evolution. Compliance within all these areas helps your company to succeed and grow.

Organisation

The best practise area of organisation deals with employee structure. It looks at the organisation of your teams and employees in terms of your workload and applications. It’s essential to have a clear structure with clearly defined employee responsibilities and priorities.

Each team should know their position in the company and be aware of how their actions affect other groups and vice versa. You should clearly define the hierarchy of each team to the whole company.

The structure of the workload also needs to be clearly defined. Assign an employee to every application, workload, platform and infrastructure component.

There are a few other steps to follow to help you achieve operational excellence.

1. Evaluate Needs

The first step in the Organisation Best Practice is to identify and evaluate needs, both internal and external. Once identified, you can determine what to prioritise.

External customer needs could involve your stakeholders, important customers or government regulations that impact your business.

Your business, development, or operational teams might have internal needs that could affect your customers.

2. Evaluate Threats

Threats to your business can be anything from other competitors to liability or security risks. Once you’ve found all the dangers, keep track of them in a risk registry. Periodically review the risk registry to determine if it’s possible to mitigate these risks or if they’ve grown in importance.

3. Encourage Experimentation

To encourage growth, build in time for your employees to learn about new techniques and advances in your field. Successful experimentation often results in more efficient practices.

Using the AWS Well-Architected Framework

The AWS Well-Architected Tool helps businesses to implement the Framework. There are also companies that can perform a Well-Architected Review to help you achieve full compliance.

WOLK is an experienced, long-term partner of the AWS Well-Architected Tool who can identify and remediate any high-risk items so you can follow the Organisational Best Practices.

Managing Change With AWS

The AWS (Amazon Web Services) Well-Architected Framework encompasses the five pillars, Operational Excellence, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Security. By following each pillar’s best practices, you can implement designs that will scale with your business.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you mitigate risks, build and deploy architectures faster, and make informed decisions.

AWS Framework and Reliability

The second pillar within the AWS Well-Architected Framework is reliability, which refers to a workload’s ability to perform consistently and correctly. Within the reliability pillar, these are the design principles to keep in mind for best practices:

Automatic failure recovery
Monitoring KPIs (key performance indicators) allows you to be notified immediately if a threshold is crossed or significant change occurs.

Procedures for test recovery
Testing how your workload might fail in the cloud allows you to see your recovery procedures’ effectiveness.

Scale horizontally
Distribute the workload across more small resources to decrease the impact of a single point of failure.

Stop guessing capacity
Accurately monitor demand to avoid over-saturating the workload.

Manage change in automation
Change infrastructure using automation.

Change Management
Change management is a critical aspect of maintaining reliability with AWS. Effectively managing change comes down to monitoring, preparing to adapt and implement the changes.

Monitoring Workload Resources
It’s possible to configure your workload to monitor performance metrics and provide updates if a major event or change occurs. The benefit of accurate performance monitoring is that you can respond quickly when negative changes occur, such as a low-threshold crossing or a system failure.

Monitoring comprises four phases which are generation, aggregation, real-time notification, and storage. In the generation phase, monitoring occurs for all parts of the workload, while aggregation refers to interpreting this data. Real-time processing allows you to have a timely response to changes in data.

The storage phase provides access to past logs for analysis of data on a larger scale. Effective monitoring means you can adapt to changes quickly.

Designing Your Workload to Adapt
You can use AWS services to automate scaling of your workload. A workload must be scalable because this provides flexibility to adapt to changes in function or performance by adding or removing resources.

Implementing Change
Changes that occur in the workload must be intentional. Run tests to ensure you can roll back a deployment at any time without disrupting service to your customers. This includes functional and resiliency testing performed in the pre-production pipeline to determine how changes you implement will impact the system.

Put Trusted IT Infrastructure in Place
AWS cloud-based software offers a scalable IT solution that can grow with your business. WOLK technology is a trusted AWS advanced consulting partner and can advise how best to manage your IT services.

How AWS Helps with Designing Operational Excellence

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a system that helps build secure and efficient infrastructure in your company’s applications and workloads. It uses five pillars, operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimisation, to streamline your workloads in the cloud.

By completing an AWS Well-Architected Review using WOLK, a Well-Architected Partner, you can ensure your application and workloads are working at their highest potential.

Operational Excellence: The First Pillar

Operational excellence is the first of five pillars in the AWS Well-Architected Framework. In this pillar, the Framework focuses on supporting business objectives, effectively running workloads, learning more about specific operations, and the ability to continue to improve procedures.

Within the pillar are five design principles: Perform operations as code, make frequent, small, reversible changes, refine operations procedures frequently, anticipate failure, and learn from all operational errors. With the AWS Well-Architected Tool, you can discover which of these principles need to be improved.

1. Perform Operations as Code

Performing all operations as code lowers the likelihood of human error from the entire workload. It creates a more streamlined system that can be easily updated and allows a faster response time.

2. Make Frequent, Small, Reversible Changes

Instead of making sweeping changes to fix a problem, the AWS Well-Architected Framework suggests beginning with small, reversible changes. If there is a problem, a small change is easily correctable and costs less time and money to address.

3. Refine Operations Procedures Frequently

Every time your business evolves, so should your operations procedures. Schedule regular meetings to ensure your workload is operating as efficiently as possible.

4. Anticipate Failure

Before starting, plan alternative options. Even after a system is in place, it can fail for many reasons. If your business has backup plans and a response plan in place, you can minimise any negative effects of a failure.

5. Learn from all Operational Failures

Just like a company should anticipate failure, a company should learn from it. Analyse the failure, and create new procedures to protect against it in the future.

Working with a Well-Architected Partner

WOLK is a leading partner of the AWS Well-Architected Program and is fully certified to provide AWS Well-Architected Reviews. After the review, which will highlight high-risk items, WOLK will begin the remediation stage. Typically, most high-risk items can be remediated using your AWS service credit, so your company will not be out of pocket.

The Best 6 Ways to Secure Your Business Information

AWS’s Well-Architected Framework offers comprehensive cloud computing services to businesses through its five pillars.

The second pillar, Security, contains methods for protecting company data, operational systems, and assets through cloud technologies. By utilising the Security pillar’s design principles and best practices, businesses can effectively secure their information with minimal risk.

Security Pillar Design Principles

AWS developed seven design principles to help shape the framework:

1. Create a clear identity foundation
2. Enable traceability across all systems
3. Apply security measures at all system layers (e.g. on all systems, applications, codes etc.)
4. Automate security where possible
5. Protect data in storage and during transfers
6. Eliminate the human role in processing data where possible
7. Prepare for security incidents

Ways to Secure Business Information Through AWS

1. Employ the Best in Practice Security Services

Use AWS services to ensure all aspects of your business information is protected as much as possible. Staying up to date with the latest technologies and recommendations helps keep your intelligence threat level low. Automation, testing, and evaluation provide opportunities to scale.

2. Identity and Access Management

Identity and access management are critical in securing important business information. It makes sure that only authenticated employees can gain access to certain data. This can be managed through an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service.

3. Detection Technology

AWS detection technology, such as CloudTrail logs, allows for processing and auditing various systems, meaning you can detect security breaches or information security threats early.

Log management is key in maintaining a Well-Architected workload, particularly if a security incident occurs. Logs can be analysed and acted on in such scenarios.

4. Infrastructure Protection

Infrastructure protection refers to information security on the cloud and on-premises. It involves AWS native or AWS integrated services that protect, monitor, and log information from points of ingress and egress linked to sensitive business information.

5. Data Protection

Before you can develop any architectural system, fundamental data protection measures should be in place. AWS services can then be used to make data encryption easier, adding further protection.

6. Incident Response

No matter how comprehensive your security systems may be, you should always have an incident response plan in place in case of a security issue. Your company can implement AWS systems to create a fast and effective incident response function.

Tools such as AWS CloudFormation allow you to write or change AWS resources in a safe environment, keeping your information safe.

Act Early to Protect Your Information

As a partner of the AWS Well-Architected Review Program, WOLK can help your business to implement a strong security plan. As a credited reviewer, we can advise you on best practices and services to suit your specific business. Contact us today to arrange a review.

AWS Well-Architected Review: applying the Framework

AWS Well-Architected Reviews use the AWS Well-Architected Framework to provide a consistent approach to evaluate and remediate systems, based on best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems for the cloud.

WOLK is a certified AWS Advanced Well-Architected Partner and is certified to provide AWS Well-Architected Reviews.

What to expect from a review:

– Free Initial Consult.
– No Commitment.
– Leading Partner of the AWS Well-Architected Program.

The process of the AWS Well-Architected Review is to take a specific workload and review it using an approach created to facilitate consistent, considered and excellent process and design. The review takes shape using a three step process:-

1) Learn – Gather information about your workload.
2) Measure – Review your workload with all the right people.
3) Improve – Create recommendations using a statement of works.

Stage 1: The Review

– You grant WOLK read-only access to your account and we complete the review with you.
– We create a document outlining the remediation work the workshop reveals.
– We present the High Risk Items (HRIs) to you along with the Scope of Work (SOW) for sign-off.
– Once signed-off, we allocate time to do the remediation, this typically takes up to two weeks.

Stage 2: The Remediation

– WOLK to complete the remediation work.
– We complete the second milestone of the WAR tool.
– We submit the result to AWS.
– AWS requires that WOLK complete the remediation to qualify for the service credit.

Stage 3: The Service Credit

– You complete AWS feedback review PLUS reply to email.
– AWS grants a service credit to you.
– We can usually complete the WAR and remediate the majority of high risk items within the service credit amount – making the exercise cost neutral to you.

Why use WOLK for your Well-Architected Review?

WOLK are a leader of the AWS Well-Architected Program and have a wealth of experience in reviewing and remediating High Risk Items within your workload. We have developed and maintain tools and unique internal processes that streamline our review and remediation process, reducing the cost and allowing for a cost neutral outcome.

As part of the Well-Architected Process, we highlight the requirement for ongoing measuring and monitoring of your compliance and workloads. WOLK offer a solution in the form of ongoing managed services that are specifically designed around the Well Architected Framework and could include:

– No out-of-pocket expenses for review and remediation.
– AWS spend invoiced monthly.
– Additional account controls or guardrails.
– Simplified and enhanced security features (Single Sign On / SSO).
– Ongoing access to updated tools, processes and monitoring.

The Top 4 Ways to Use AWS to Improve Performance Efficiency

Amazon Web Services (AWS) employs a five pillar framework to guide and assist businesses in adopting continuous best practices through cloud services. You can use these conceptual pillars to improve the performance efficiency of a business.

The Performance Efficiency pillar is most crucial in developing performance. It involves using computing resources to improve the efficiency of a business’ systems and subsequently to sustain efficiency as the market changes and technologies advance.

At WOLK, we are AWS experts. With many years of experience designing complex network architecture, our team can help you leverage AWS to improve the performance efficiency of your business.

1. Allows Your Team to Focus on Core Competencies

Through the design principles of Performance Efficiency, businesses can use technology as a service rather than assigning members of their IT team to the task of learning, hosting, and running new technological services. Technologies such as NoSQL, a database that stores and retrieves data, can fulfil complex tasks quickly and efficiently, allowing members of your team to focus on the core competencies of your business. NoSQLs are used more in big data and real-time applications as they are faster and more flexible than other types of databases.

2. Lower Costs Through Serverless Architectures

Another product of the design principles of Performance Efficiency is the use of serverless architecture. This eliminates the need to operate using physical servers, which can be a tedious and costly operation. By managing services via the cloud, businesses can lower their costs, improving performance efficiency.

3. Optimise Architecture Through Service Selection

There are many types of AWS resources, from standard databases to artificial intelligence (AI) and data lakes. Through these systems, you can create and optimise an architecture to best suit your workload. Organisations can use data analysis software to find the most useful programs for their specific business or industry. AWS Partner Network (APN) suggests architecture selections based on industry knowledge. For example, it may recommend that you use Amazon Elastic Block Store for low-latency block cloud storage.

4. Improve Efficiency Through Innovation

Reviewing and monitoring are two of the best practices of Performance Efficiency. AWS is constantly innovating to meet customer demands. Through new innovative AWS services, regions, edge locations and other features, you can improve performance efficiency. Once you have implemented a new workload, you must monitor it and analyse its performance. AWS services like Amazon CloudWatch can monitor a workload and provide you with information and actionable insights, helping you determine opportunities to improve efficiency.

Get an AWS Well-Architected Review

WOLK is a partner of the AWS Well-Architected Program. With certifications to carry out framework reviews, we can help your business to improve performance efficiency. Contact us today to schedule a review.