Author: James Bettaney

What is the Focus of the Amazon Web Services Sustainability Pillar?

Sustainability is the sixth and newest pillar of the Amazon Web Services Well-Architected Framework, introduced in 2021 to supplement the original five; Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimisation.

Learn about the role and importance of the Sustainability pillar and how to implement pillar guidelines into your business’s workload infrastructure.

Core Design Principles of Sustainability

Sustainability in the cloud is about managing the long-term impact of your business and its activities on three fronts: environmental, economic, and societal.

According to the Amazon whitepaper on AWS sustainability, a sustainable cloud business must follow six core design principles to meet the AWS guidelines for sustainable infrastructure.

1. Understand your impact
Measure the performance and impact of your business’ cloud workload and the resources needed and emissions produced to achieve this performance.

Most businesses use the data to establish and monitor the business’ Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and build a data dashboard listing the most important KPIs in an easily readable format.

2. Establish sustainability goals
Based on your KPIs and business performance measurements, make long-term plans to improve sustainability. The two primary approaches are:

● Reducing the resources and emissions needed to achieve the same workload
● Improving the workload and capabilities with the same available resources

3. Maximise utilisation
Identify resources and equipment idling or running at less than optimal load. For example, consolidating two hosts, each running at less than 50% utilisation, into a single host running close to 100% helps reduce power consumption without diminishing your capabilities.

4. Anticipate and adopt
If new more efficient hardware and software become available, implement them as soon as possible. Continually research and review technological developments and model your business around frequent hardware upgrades, minimising downtime and maximising cost-efficiency with up-to-date technologies.

5. Use managed services
AWS Managed Services are sets of tools automating various infrastructure management tasks. Although the primary advantage of leveraging AWS Managed Services is to improve your operational capabilities, they are also critical for sustainability.

AWS Managed Services can help you automatically manage your equipment utilisation rate and ensure your hardware is used as efficiently as possible.

6. Reduce the downstream impact
The downstream impact is the resources and energy needed to access and use your services. Minimising your downstream impact means your customers can use your services with the least computational power possible, reducing or eliminating the need to upgrade their hardware or devices.

Trust an Experienced AWS Partner

The best way to ensure your business’s compliance with the core principles of sustainability and the other pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework is to work with an experienced AWS Partner such as the WOLK Team.

Contact us today for a Well-Architected Review of your business.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework’s first pillar, Operational Excellence, ensures your company runs optimally. To accomplish operational excellence, you can follow the four designated best practice areas of this pillar, organisation, prepare, operate, and evolve.

The first best practice area, organisation, is critical for Operational Excellence because having an organised system makes it easier to identify and solve problems and allows your team to work together seamlessly.

Organisation Helps Your Team Work Better
Knowing exactly what they should be doing at all times helps your team remain consistent and excel at their jobs. Without an organised structure, your team may not know what to do without asking a supervisor, slowing down their pace.

You can also benefit from organised goals. If your team knows your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly goals, they can alert someone if they notice your output falling behind. Additionally, knowing the goals can empower your team to work harder.

Having an organised plan for emergencies can help reduce the damage since you won’t need to spend time devising a way to deal with the problem. If you follow the organisation best practice, your team should know the process for dealing with most contingencies. Ensure you create contingency plans for various problems, including physical ones, like a fire in the building or loss of electricity, and virtual ones, like a hacking attempt or a virus in your system.

Ensures You Meet All Regulations
Another significant benefit of following organisational best practices is that you minimise your chances of missing an important deadline or failing to fulfil an industry regulation. Some industries have extensive regulations, from reporting requirements to maintaining certain standards.

Particularly if you operate across national borders, remembering and following all the necessary regulations is challenging. Having an organised structure that tracks deadlines and requirements is essential to keeping your company’s practice aligned with legal requirements. Additionally, you can organise a structure that continues to check for any changes in regulations that could affect your operations.

Work With WOLK to Ensure Your Organisation is Top-Notch
WOLK is an AWS Well-Architected Program Partner and can offer you an AWS Well-Architected Program Review. Starting with an initial, free consultation, we review all your business practices and ensure that you comply with the AWS Well-Architected Program.

We can identify any problem areas and offer solutions, whether you need help organising your structure or improving your cloud security protocols.

Call us today on 03 8669 1414 to learn more about how we can help your company excel with AWS.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An Overview of the AWS Well-Architected Tool

The Amazon Web Services Well-Architected Tool (AWS WA Tool) is an Amazon cloud service designed to aid you in documenting and measuring your workloads with a high degree of accuracy. The primary purpose of this tool is to provide specific guidance according to the principles of the Well-Architected Framework.

The AWS WA Tool is free and available to all AWS users through the Management Console. Here’s an overview of the WA Tool and how it works.

Workload Definition
The AWS WA Tool is designed to provide consistent and accurate measurements of your workloads, document your workload decisions, and provide recommendations to improve efficiency.

However, before the WA Tool can provide you with data, you must first define your workloads by following a few essential steps. If you manage multiple workloads, repeat these steps for each one that applies.

Workload State Documentation
Once you have defined the workload, the tool will ask you a series of questions to learn about your needs and practices according to the six pillars of the Well-Architected Framework. These six pillars are operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimisation, and sustainability.

Framework Lens and Improvement Plan
The AWS WA Tool will review the data you entered in the previous steps and identify potential vulnerabilities and risks, classifying them by severity, such as high risk or medium risk. It will then offer a multi-step improvement plan to address each risk and help your workload fully comply with the Well-Architected Framework.

● High-risk issues are operational or architectural choices that the AWS WA Tool has determined might be significantly detrimental to your business. These elements may negatively impact operations, assets, or individuals.
● Medium-risk issues are operational or architectural choices that the WA Tool believes might risk your business, but to a lesser degree than high-risk issues. These issues may also have a lesser chance of negatively affecting operations, assets, and individuals.

After determining the risk points, follow the recommendations to eliminate vulnerabilities, implement improvements, and track progress for each step.
You can identify each step with one of five markers: None, Not Started, In Progress, Complete, and Risk Acknowledged.

The first four indicate risk mitigation progress markers, whereas Risk Acknowledged is a marker typically reserved for risks your business cannot mitigate, like accepting a specific risk point and accepting all potential outcomes as possibilities.

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.

How AWS Can Help with Disaster Recovery

One of the central tenets of the Well-Architected Framework is planning for failure. Even though the goal is to avoid problems, they will still occasionally occur. If you and your team have a clear goal in place following AWS guidelines, the failure will cost you less time.

The first steps to help with disaster recovery have to do with preparation. Have backups in place and create redundant workload components.

The Well-Architected Framework has laid out five best practices to help you plan for disaster recovery.

1. Define Recovery Objectives
Define your recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) based on business goals. To create these objectives, break down your workload into categories of need. You’ll want to create five categories or less.

When determining your categories, consider whether the workload tools are internal or public. You will also want to identify the primary business driver and estimate the downtime’s impact on your business.

2. Meet Recovery Objectives
After creating your categories, you can design a disaster recovery (DR) plan that meets your objectives. Depending on the structure of your workload, you might require a multi-region strategy. AWS suggests several strategies of varying complexity and cost.

You can choose a simple backup and restore strategy, meaning you store your data in the DR region. In case of a disaster, you can restore RPO within hours and RTO within 24 hours.

The Pilot Light strategy lessens the recovery time by maintaining a small version of your core system in the DR region. RPO recovery time is minutes, and RTO is hours.

The Warm Standby strategy offers an even shorter recovery, achieving the RPO in seconds and the RTO in minutes. In this strategy, you keep a mini version of your full system always running in the DR region. In case of disaster, you can quickly increase its capacity to handle all your business’ needs.

The Multi-region Active-active strategy uses multiple AWS regions. If one region fails, you can redirect traffic to the other regions.

3. Test Disaster Recovery Implementation
Whichever strategy you choose, it’s critical to evaluate it regularly. Ensure that all backup systems are functioning and your plan meets your RPO and RTO in the correct amount of time.

4. Manage Configuration Drift
Keep an eye on your DR region, ensuring the infrastructure, data, and configuration are in good condition.

5. Automate Recovery
Use automated recovery systems like CloudEndure Disaster Recovery to remove the possibility of human error.

Schedule a Well-Architected Review
To ensure your strategies follow the guidelines of the Well-Architected Framework, schedule a Well-Architected Review. AWS Partner, WOLK can identify any issues in your designs and mitigate them for you.