General guiding principles

1. Stop guessing your capacity needs
2. Test systems at production scale
3. Automate to make architectural experimentation easier
4. Allow for evolutionary architectures (changing requirements)
5. Drive architectures using data
6. Improve through game days e.g. simulate apps for flash sale days

I. Operational Excellence

1. Includes the ability to run and monitor systems and deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures.

2. Design principles

   1. Perform operations as a code (IaaS)
   2. Annotate docs (Auto docs after every build)
   3. Make frequent, small, reversible changes (push small and frequently)
   4. Refine operations procedures frequently
   5. Anticipate failure
   6. Learn from all operational failures

3. AWS operational excellence

   1. Prepare — CloudFormation, Config
   2. Operate — CloudFormation, Config, CloudTrail, CoudWatch, X-Ray
   3. Evolve — CloudFormation, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CodeDeploy

II. Security

1. Includes the ability to protect information, systems and assets while delivering business values through risk assessment and mitigation strategies.

2. Design principles

   1. Implement a strong identity foundation
   2. Enable traceability
   3. Apply security at all layers (edge, subnet, ALB, VPC)
   4. Automate security best practices
   5. Protect data in transit and at rest
   6. Keep people away from data
   7. Prepare for security events

3. AWS services

   1. IAM — IAM, STS, Orgs
   2. Detective controls — Config, CloudTrail, CloudWatch
   3. Infra — CloudFront, VPC, WAF, Shield, Inspector
   4. Data protection — KMS, S3, ELB
   5. Incident response — IAM, CloudFormation

III. Reliability

1. Ability to recover from infra or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions, transient network issues.

2. Design principles

   1. Test recovery procedure (simulate failure scenarios)
   2. Automatically recover from failure
   3. Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability
   4. Stop guessing capacity (never under-provision)
   5. Manage change in automation

3. AWS

   1. Foundations — IAM, VPC, Service Limits, Trusted Advisor
   2. Change Management — Auto Scaling, CloudWatch, CLoudTrail, Config
   3. Failure Management — Backups, CloudFormation, S3, Glacier, Route 53

IV. Performance Efficiency