The Cloud Journey

Question 1

List the 5 pillars of a well architected framework

Answer 1

Designed to enable architects, developers and users of AWS to build secure, high-performing, resilient, cost-effective and efficient infrastructure for their applications

1) Operational excellence
* Ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures
* Design principles include performing operations as code, annotating documentation, anticipating failure and frequently making small, reversible changes
2) Security
* Ability to protect information, systems and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies
* Best practices:
- Automate security best practices hen possible
- Apply security at all layers
- Protect data in transit and at rest
3) Reliability
* Ability of a system to:
- Recover from infrastructure or service disruptions
- Dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand
- Mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues
* Includes testing recovery procedures, scaling horizontally to increase aggregate system availability and automatically recovering from failure
4) Performance efficiency
* Ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve
* Evaluating the performance efficiency of the architecture includes experimenting more often, using serverless architectures and designing systems to be able to go global in minutes
5) Cost optimization
* Ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point
* Cost optimization includes adopting a consumption model, analyzing and attributing expenditure and using managed services to reduce the cost of ownership

Question 2

List the 6 advantages of cloud computing

Answer 2

1) Trade upfront expense for variable expense
* Upfront expenses include data centers, physical servers and other resources that would need to invest in before using computing resources
* Instead of investing heavily in data centers and servers before know how going to use the, can pay only when consume computing resources
2) Benefit from massive economies of scale
* Achieve a lower variable cost than can get on own
* Usage from hundreds of thousands of customers aggregates in the cloud, providers such as AWS can achieve higher economies of scale and economies of scale translate into lower pay-as-you-go prices
3) Stop guessing capacity
* Don’t have to predict how much infrastructure capacity needed before deploying an application
4) Increase speed and agility
* The flexibility of cloud computing makes it to develop and deploy applications
* This flexibility also provides development teams with more time t experiment and innovate
5) Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers
* Data centers often require to spend more money and time managing infrastructure and servers
* Benefit of cloud computing is the ability to focus less on these tasks and more on applications and customers
6) Go global in minutes
* The AWS Cloud footprint enables to quickly deploy applications to customers around the world, while providing them with low latency