AWS Well-Architected Best Practices Workshop

Length: 1 Day

Introduction & Framework Overview

• AWS Well-Architected Framework purpose and history

• The six pillars at a glance

• How to use the Well-Architected Tool in the console

Pillar 1: Operational Excellence

• Design principles: operations as code, small reversible changes, anticipate failure

• Observability: CloudWatch, X-Ray, CloudTrail integration

• Runbooks and playbooks for incident response

• Infrastructure as Code with CloudFormation/CDK

• Discussion: real-world operational debt scenarios

Pillar 2: Security

• Identity and access management (IAM policies, roles, least privilege)

• Detective controls: GuardDuty, Security Hub, Config rules

• Infrastructure protection: VPCs, security groups, WAF

• Data protection: encryption at rest (KMS) and in transit (TLS)

• Incident response preparation

• Lab exercise: reviewing an IAM policy for least privilege violations

Pillar 3: Reliability

• Foundations: service quotas, network topology planning

• Change management: monitoring, auto-scaling triggers

• Failure management: fault isolation, backup/recovery strategies

• Multi-AZ vs. multi-region architectures

• RTO/RPO planning and disaster recovery patterns

• Case study: designing for a regional outage

Pillar 4: Performance Efficiency

• Selection: choosing the right compute, storage, database, and network options

• Review: benchmarking and load testing approaches

• Monitoring: identifying bottlenecks with CloudWatch and Performance Insights

• Trade-offs: caching strategies, read replicas, CDN usage

• Discussion: when to use serverless vs. containers vs. EC2

Pillar 5: Cost Optimization

• Expenditure awareness: Cost Explorer, Budgets, tagging strategies

• Cost-effective resources: Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, Spot

• Right-sizing with Compute Optimizer

• Matching supply and demand: auto-scaling, scheduling

• Exercise: analyzing a sample cost allocation report

Pillar 6: Sustainability

• Understanding the shared responsibility model for sustainability

• Region selection and efficient resource utilization

• Managed services and their sustainability benefits

• Data management: tiering, lifecycle policies, deduplication

• Software and architecture patterns that reduce environmental impact

Practical Application & Wrap-Up

• Conducting a Well-Architected Review: walkthrough of the tool

• Prioritizing findings: high-risk items vs. improvement opportunities

• Building a remediation roadmap

• Integrating reviews into your SDLC

• Q&A and discussion