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Reinforce your organisation’s commitment to build workloads correctly while consistently delivering a great customer experience by adopting best practices for your cloud operations including incident management, change management, and resource provisioning.

The operational excellence pillar focuses on your ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures. It emphasizes the benefits of automation, efficient resource utilization, and the use of operational metrics to drive decision-making.

• Drive automation in your cloud operations to reduce level of effort required to make changes and reduce risk by adopting standard of making frequent, small and reversible changes.
• Gain business and operational insights by architecting for insights into the health of your workloads and the success metrics of your cloud operations.
• Evaluate cloud operational readiness of both your workload and team.
• Prepare for and respond to events using runbooks and playbooks.

Security is a fundamental and critical consideration in any architecture. This pillar focuses on embedding security in every layer of your architecture including implementation of strong security measures to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies.

• Build cloud native architectures with security enabled at all layers and tracing across usage and changes by implementing a strong identity foundation.
• Leverage AWS control methodologies for protection of your infrastructure to meet best practices and industry or regulatory obligations.
• Keep your data confidential while preserving its integrity and availability at rest and in transit.
• Use fine-grained access control to control and manage who can do what.
• Define trust boundaries for your networks and applications.
• Take advantage of managed services to reduce maintenance tasks including patching, hardening while you focus on your core business.
• Use detective controls to detect or identify a security breach and automate resolution procedures.

Reliability pillar speaks to the ability of your workloads to perform their intended function correctly and consistently when they are expected to. It includes the ability to operate and test workloads through their total lifecycle.

To ensure reliability of your workloads, there is a strong focus on resiliency which speaks to:

• Recovering from infrastructure or service disruptions with tested and automatic failure management procedures.
• Dynamically acquiring compute resources to meet demand.
• Mitigating disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues.

To achieve workload resiliency, it is critical to identify foundational elements around setup and cross-project requirements, make architectural design choices aimed at prevention and mitigation of failures, and adopt effective change management policies to deliver positive outcomes for your business.

Performance efficiency focuses on your ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes as technologies evolve.

This pillar focuses on key performance factors including:

• Selecting the right resource type for your workloads including computing, storage, and databases.
• Optimizing your workload selections as AWS continues to innovate with new resource types and features.
• Performance monitoring and leveraging of AWS automation tools to resolve any performance issues.
• Adoption of best practices in making architectural trade-offs to maximise performance efficiency.

Cost optimisation focuses on designing architectures that deliver business value at the lowest possible price point. Key focus areas include:

• Cloud financial management – realise business value and financial success as you monitor, visualise and optimise your AWS costs and usage.
• Control and understand where your money is being spent with expenditure and usage awareness by leveraging AWS cost and usage monitoring and reporting tools.
• Select cost-effective resource types and appropriate pricing models to effectively manage costs.
• Manage demand and supply with the right size of resources using services such as autoscaling, caching or queueing.
• Optimise your workloads over time by taking advantage of new services or features.

The sustainability pillar addresses the long-term environmental, economic, and societal impact of your business activities by measuring the impact of your cloud workloads and modelling their future impact. When building cloud workloads, the practice of sustainability is understanding the impacts of the services used, quantifying impacts through the entire workload lifecycle, and applying design principles and best practices to reduce these impacts. Sustainability in the cloud is a nearly continuous effort focused primarily on energy reduction and efficiency across all components of a workload by achieving the maximum benefit from the resources provisioned and minimising the total resources required.

• Align to or establish sustainability goals for your workloads. For each cloud workload, establish long-term sustainability goals such as reducing the compute and storage resources required per transaction.
• Model the return on investment of sustainability improvements for existing workloads.
• Right-size workloads and implement efficient design to verify high utilisation and maximise the energy efficiency of the underlying hardware.

  451 Research found that AWS can lower customers’ workload carbon footprints by nearly 80% compared to surveyed enterprise data centres, and up to 96% once AWS is powered with 100% renewable energy—a target AWS is on path to meet by 2025.
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