AWS Well-Architected Framework & Cloud Migration
Difficulty: easy
Overview
The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides best practices for building secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient cloud infrastructure.
The 6 Pillars:
- Operational Excellence — Run and monitor systems, continually improve processes and procedures.
- Security — Protect information, systems, and assets through risk assessments and mitigation strategies.
- Reliability — Recover from disruptions, meet demand, and mitigate failures. Focuses on RTO/RPO.
- Performance Efficiency — Use computing resources efficiently and maintain that efficiency as demand changes.
- Cost Optimization — Eliminate waste, right-size resources, and use the right pricing models.
- Sustainability — Minimize environmental impacts of running cloud workloads.
AWS Well-Architected Tool — Free service to review workloads against these pillars.
AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF):
Helps organizations identify gaps in skills and processes across 6 perspectives: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, Operations. Benefits: reduced business risk, improved ESG performance, increased revenue, improved operational efficiency.
Migration Strategies (7 Rs):
- Rehost (Lift-and-Shift) — Move as-is to AWS; fastest migration, minimal changes.
- Replatform — Minor optimizations (e.g., move to RDS instead of self-managed MySQL on EC2).
- Re-architect / Refactor — Redesign using cloud-native features for maximum benefit.
- Repurchase — Move to a SaaS product (e.g., switch CRM to Salesforce).
- Retain — Keep on-premises for now (not ready to migrate).
- Retire — Decommission applications that are no longer needed.
- Relocate — Move to AWS without changes (e.g., VMware Cloud on AWS).
AWS Snow Family — Physical devices to move large amounts of data to AWS when network transfer is impractical (Snowcone, Snowball Edge, Snowmobile).
Practice Linked Questions
Q1. How many pillars make up the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
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Q2. A company wants to ensure their AWS workload can automatically recover from failures, scale to meet demand, and meet recovery time objectives. Which Well-Architected pillar should guide their design?
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Q3. Which AWS Well-Architected pillar focuses on minimizing the environmental impact of running cloud workloads by using resources efficiently?
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Q4. A company is planning to migrate to AWS and wants to develop a structured plan that identifies gaps in their organization's skills, processes, and technology. Which AWS framework is designed for this purpose?
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Q5. A company wants to migrate their on-premises web application to AWS as quickly as possible with minimal code changes. They plan to simply move the existing servers to AWS virtual machines. Which migration strategy does this describe?
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Q6. A company audited its application portfolio before cloud migration and found several legacy applications that are no longer used by anyone in the organization. What is the recommended migration strategy for these applications?
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Q7. Which AWS service provides a free, self-service tool to review your AWS workloads against the AWS Well-Architected Framework pillars and identify improvement opportunities?
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