Why is AWS Well Architected Review important and what can it do for you in the long run?

Hello. Hope you are in great health, both physically and mentally. By the way, how is your cloud doing? When was the last time you did a diagnostic run on your cloud setup? If you did do a diagnostic run, was it a tool based one? Ok, I am going to stop asking you questions, instead, take you through the ‘Well Architected Review’ program launched by AWS and the benefits of getting your cloud setup audited under this framework.

So what’s is an AWS Well Architected Review?

AWS, as you may know, enjoys the largest share in the public cloud market with millions of active customers and billions of AWS accounts and possibly trillions of active AWS services consumed. Apart from building one of the technologically advanced cloud platforms, AWS built a customer first culture within their organization and the partner network, much like their bigger business – Amazon.com.

I have been working with AWS since 2012 and I have always seen AWS solution architects and account managers concerned about the way customer is using AWS and the costs they incur. I have never come across an AWS customer manager who was happy to see their customer consume more than what they should ideally do. I believe this culture comes all the way from the top.

So after all the lessons AWS learnt in the last 13 years of their public cloud journey, they put together a framework which will help customers run their cloud in a highly optimized manner. This framework is termed as ‘AWS Well Architected Framework’ and the review done on one’s AWS cloud setup is called ‘AWS Well Architected Review’ also called as WAR.

AWS Well Architected Review analyses the customer’s AWS setup across 5 pillars – Cost, Security, Performance, Reliability, and Operations. The cloud account is benchmarked against various best practices under these 5 pillars and a report is generated which highlights the gaps and vulnerabilities identified across these 5 pillars.

Why do you need a continuous WAR on your cloud setup?

An active business will have an active AWS setup. You might have multiple AWS accounts with multiple users accessing your accounts. This brings in a lot of changes to your security settings, cost consumption, resource utilization, etc. If you are looking at better governance and optimized costs, you should ideally be doing the WAR on a continuous basis. One bad VPC setup with all ports open can cause you a lot of trouble and you may not know when will these hit you badly. Ok, I am not trying to scare you, but this is the reality and I have seen these happening time and again in the last 7 years irrespective of various precautions taken by cloud administrators. We are humans after all and it is always good to rely on a machine to do its job so that we can sleep peacefully.

How can CloudEnsure help you in keeping your cloud systems optimized and secure?

AWS Well Architected Review, as on the day I am writing this blog post, is a manual process. Some of the top AWS consulting partners, like Powerup – a Premier Consulting Partner of AWS, have completed several 1000 WARs for their customer’s AWS accounts and have been certified as an AWS Well Architected Competency Partner. These certified partners work like an extension to the AWS solution architects and conduct WARs on customer accounts to give them a detailed report on their cloud health.

After delivering these 1000s of WARs for our customer accounts, the think tank at Powerupcloud got together to see if we can automate the whole process which will help customers to be continuously compliant with the Well Architected Framework. After a few weeks of forging at the furnace, CloudEnsure was wielded as a SaaS platform which the customers can subscribe and run their Well Architected Reviews without any manual intervention.

CloudEnsure’s Intelligent Cloud Management Assistant is built as an agent which checks for the vulnerabilities and gaps in your cloud setup under the 5 pillars of Well Architected Review, highlights the issues to the resource level (eg: one of your ports in a particular VPC is open for all public access) and more importantly, assists you with the fix which needs to be implemented. You can use these recommendations and fix the issues yourself, or you can reach out to CloudEnsure Certified Partners who can come in and fix the issues for you.

CloudEnsure will publish a health rating for your cloud setup – CloudEnsure Cloud Health Rating^TM (CHR). Your CHR will determine the health of your cloud setup, more like the BMR for your body.

So, what’s next?

If you are an AWS customer: Sign-up today for a 14-day free-trial and know your CHR immediately. Fix the recommendations yourself or reach out to one of our CloudEnsure Certified Partners to implement the recommendations on your cloud account.

If you are an AWS Partner: Speak to us and take the 5-day training program which will help you conduct Well Architected Review for your customers using the CloudEnsure platform. Get your customer secured on the cloud with best practices implemented, and build a great story for you and your customer.

Sign-up today for a 14-day free-trial and receive $5000 AWS credits in your account.