Whether you are developing cloud native applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or modernizing existing applications and migrating them to AWS, as a customer, you will have to make many decisions through the application lifecycle. Taking a data-led, best-practice approach will help you create a well-architected application and application environment on AWS. That is what 91快活林鈥檚 AWS Cloud Optimization Assessment Service is all about. It provides a consistent approach for customers to evaluate architectures and implement designs that scale automatically with needs.

Sindhu Vidyasagar, 91快活林鈥檚 AWS Alliance Manager,聽 interviews Vipul Tankariya, Chief Architect, 91快活林 AWS Business Group to provide prescriptive architectural advice about 91快活林鈥檚 AWS Cloud Optimization Assessment Service. This blog showcases how 91快活林 enables customers to build the most secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure possible for their applications leveraging this offering.

Sindhu: Let us start with the basic question - what exactly is 91快活林鈥檚 AWS Cloud Optimization Assessment Service?

Vipul: As the name suggests, 91快活林鈥檚 AWS Cloud Optimization Assessment Services offers assessment of customer鈥檚 workloads on AWS cloud and provides recommendations for optimizing the workloads based on the AWS Well Architected Framework. Workloads are reviewed by Well Architected Review Ambassadors who are also certified by AWS at the professional certification level. The review focuses on five pillars as per AWS Well Architected Framework namely: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization. At each pillar, the reviewer analyzes the workload against the respective design principles and generates recommendations.

Sindhu: Which customers could benefit from such a review?

Vipul: Any organization using AWS can benefit from such reviews. In this fast-paced world, the technical landscape demands changes as the business landscape evolves. You may not need the same resources, sizing, and availability of the resources as time progresses. Also, it is likely that the business demand has increased, and it has had an impact on RTO and RPO of the workloads. Similarly, the threat landscape keeps changing - if you do not regularly assess workload security, you may be running a risk. Besides, with rapidly evolving cloud services, you may be missing out on many opportunities for simplifying your workloads using newer services, and reducing operational overheads. Hence, a review of your workloads every three to six months is highly recommended.

Sindhu: What are the benefits reaped by customers with this service? 聽Can you share a little bit about what the customer experience has been like?

Vipul: There are many benefits of performing well-architected reviews of the workloads. With regular reviews and implementation of the recommendations, customers can build and deploy their workloads faster, lower or mitigate risks, make informed decisions, implement AWS best practices, and optimize the overall cost to run their workloads. The recommendations generated at each pillar help in running and monitoring systems to deliver business value while continually improving processes. It helps in protecting data, systems and assets while delivering business value through risk assessment and mitigation. Organizations can recover fast from infrastructure or service failures and dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand. You can use compute resources efficiently to meet system requirements and avoid/eliminate unwanted costs while spreading expenditure awareness.

Sindhu: Can you share what that journey would look like for the customer?

Vipul: Well Architected Review Process is divided into four phases - Pre-Review Planning, Review, Analysis and Recommendation Development, Executive Summary Generation.

In Pre-Review Planning, a date and time for the review is decided and the priority workload is identified. We also share a complete discovery questionnaire with the customer team that they can fill offline. All the stakeholders for the workload are identified and invited for the review.

The WAR Ambassador performs an on-site face to face review, or the review is performed remotely. The WAR Ambassador understands all the critical aspects of the workload in conversation with the respective stakeholders. Subsequently a collaborative review of the completed discovery questionnaire is performed and its alignment with the five pillars of Well-Architected Framework is discussed in detail.

In the subsequent stage WAR Ambassador focuses on Analysis and Recommendation Development. All the data gathered in the previous stages are analyzed to create findings. Such analysis helps in finding any immediate risks and potential cost savings. After thorough analysis and deliberation, a detailed recommendation report along with priority improvement plan is generated.

The last and the most important stage in the review process is to generate an executive summary with actionable items. This stage focuses on recommendations that are based on business implications of your workload design decisions. A prioritized improvement plan based on the core framework pillars is generated. This executive summary is used for a detailed discussion with the customer stakeholders and next steps are decided to implement the recommendations.

Sindhu: Can you walk us through 91快活林鈥檚 journey of integrating WAR into our existing business process?

Vipul: 91快活林鈥檚 AWS Cloud Optimization Assessment Service based on AWS Well Architected Framework is at the heart of our approach to setting up customer workloads on AWS. 91快活林 teams follow design principles on general design, security, operations, reliability, performance, and cost while designing target environment for a customer workload. However, all best practices are followed during the inception of the projects, we keep recommending customers to periodically assess their workloads for keeping its alignment with AWS Well Architected Framework.

Sindhu: I am sure our readers would benefit by understanding our alignment with AWS account teams, solution architects and AWS professional services in this entire process. Can you talk about that?

Vipul: 91快活林 is globally one of the largest AWS partners and AWS certified WAR partner. There are dedicated partner solution architects, AWS SMEs and Business Development Managers who work with 91快活林 teams across multiple geographies. This alliance team from AWS is an extended part of 91快活林 and we work on a common goal to generate value for our end customers as a single team. AWS team works together with 91快活林 team from day one to ensure customer success jointly.

Sindhu: Does this service cater to specific workloads?

Vipul: All or any workload that is hosted on AWS can utilize Well Architected Review for optimizing the way it operates on AWS.

Sindhu:聽How many 91快活林 customers /enterprises adopt the recommendations from the 91快活林 AWS Well Architected Review Program? What鈥檚 the average cost saving? Security issue must have been identified in each case.

Vipul: While we do follow the design principles on each of our AWS engagements, we also perform periodic Well-Architected Reviews for many customer workloads depending up on the type of engagement we have with them. The benefits of such reviews vary. We have worked on certain customer workloads wherein we have optimized the AWS consumption cost by up to 70% in certain cases. It depends on where in the level of maturity the customer workload stands at the time of initiating the review. Yes, we have also identified and addressed certain high risk line items on customer workloads. Such periodic reviews of the workloads help us in proactively identifying and addressing the risks before they transpire into any disaster.

Sindhu: Have you seen any resistance from customer teams while performing such reviews? And how do we overcome that?

Vipul: Customers do understand the importance of this process. It is rare that we come across customer stakeholders who feel this exercise is a process of fault finding, but it is not. We not only highlight risks and areas of optimization but we also highlight aspects of the workloads that are well-architected. It鈥檚 nobody鈥檚 fault if there is misalignment between the technology landscape and the business landscape, it鈥檚 the time decay. Cost of inaction is more than identifying and addressing the issues with such reviews. Customers do understand this and proactively work with 91快活林 teams in aligning their workloads with the guiding principles. As I have mentioned earlier, technology landscape as well as the business landscape keeps changing and such reviews are a journey and not a destination.

Sindhu: Thanks Vipul for sharing your insights on this.

For conducting Well-Architected Reviews of your workloads, please reach out to 91快活林 AWS Business Group