AWS architecture best practices for building secure and scalable cloud applications
Cloud infra optimization.png

AWS architecture best practices for building secure and scalable cloud applications

Cloud infra optimization.png

AWS architecture is like a blueprint you use to design, organize, and implement services and resources in Amazon Web Services (AWS)

However, to create an architecture that can support anything from small-scale applications to complex systems, you should follow AWS architecture best practices. These guidelines help you develop a rock-solid foundation for building reliable, scalable, and secure applications in the cloud.

In this article, we’ll walk you through some of the best practices for optimizing your AWS infrastructure and introduce handy tools for streamlining their implementation. 

What is the AWS Well-Architected Framework?

AWS architecture best practices are based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The Framework provides a set of guidelines that help you design secure, reliable, scalable, and cost-effective systems in AWS. It’s intended for cloud architects, developers, technology officers, and operations team members, enabling them to build an efficient infrastructure for all kinds of applications and workloads.

The Well-Architected Framework revolves around six pillars:

Operational excellence

Operational excellence refers to the ability to run workloads effectively, build high-quality applications, continuously improve operational processes, and deliver an excellent customer experience.

Security

The security pillar focuses on protecting your data, systems, and assets to improve the overall security of your business operations.

Reliability

Emphasizes your workload’s ability to perform its intended function accurately and consistently, even amid system or network disruptions.

Performance efficiency

Concentrates on the ability to optimize resource use and remain efficient as demand changes and technologies evolve.

Cost optimization

Describes how to reduce AWS resource costs without affecting your operational efficiency and consistency.

Sustainability

Focuses on reducing energy consumption and addresses how your business activities impact the environment.

Each pillar entails a set of design principles—strategies for building your AWS architecture. Meanwhile, each principle includes multiple best practices and actionable steps for its successful implementation.

What are the AWS Well-Architected best practices?

In the following section, we’ll explore the AWS Well-Architected Framework best practices associated with each of the six pillars and provide actionable steps for implementing them.

Operational excellence

Implementing best practices for operational excellence helps you organize your team and continuously optimize your workloads. Here’s what that means:

Component

Definition

Organize

Your teams should be organized around the same business goals and have a shared understanding of your entire workload. They also need to know exactly how they contribute to achieving key outcomes and stay aligned with business priorities to maintain efficiency and accountability.

Prepare

You should be able to understand your workloads and how they behave. Emphasize the observability of your systems and adopt practices that enable rapid feedback and quick recovery from changes. It’s also crucial to constantly evaluate your operational readiness to ensure your team is well-prepared to handle issues.

Operate

You should collect and analyze key metrics, define acceptable limits for them, and receive alerts if they exceed or fall below the limit. This will help you quickly resolve issues that impact your business operations.

Evolve

To make sure your application evolves, you should learn, share, and continuously improve your infrastructure by making small, ongoing changes. You should also perform a post-incident analysis to spot areas for improvement and share the findings with your teams.

Security

Implementing security best practices will help you protect your workload from threats and unauthorized access. You can use several AWS tools to apply best practices in the areas like:

  • Access management

  • Infrastructure and data protection

  • Threat detection and incident response

To protect your resources from unauthorized access, clearly define who can access your AWS data and how they can interact with it. The AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) tool lets you create policies (rules) that define what specific users can do with your AWS services. For example, you might allow developers to access your cloud storage (S3) to upload files but prevent them from deleting any data. 

Classify your data based on sensitivity to ensure stronger protection. You can use AWS Tags (resource labels) to mark internal documents as sensitive, allowing minimal access to them. You can also label confidential data as highly sensitive and use encryption to enhance protection.

To further enhance your architecture’s security, it’s worth relying on AWS services and resources like:

  • GuardDuty: This threat detection service uses anomaly and threat detection capabilities and machine learning (ML) models to protect your AWS accounts, workloads, and data. It continuously monitors data logs and your resources’ runtime activity to detect and rank threats based on security risks. 

  • Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): Creating a VPC—your own private network in a public cloud—helps you control who enters and exits your network. It includes route tables that direct traffic, gateways that control traffic between internal and external networks, and private subnets that keep your data safe from the public internet.

Reliability and scalability

Building a reliable AWS architecture means using services and tools that can handle system failures effectively and scale with demand. It entails best practices like:

  • Designing a reliable infrastructure to run software

  • Implementing failure management to ensure your app runs smoothly amid system failures

  • Scaling your application to handle changes in demand

You can develop and run reliable software in one place using an AWS software development kit (SDK). It provides developers with coding tools in different programming languages like Java and Python. For example, a debugger tool can help you locate and correct errors in software code quickly, while an application programming interface (API) library (a collection of pre-written code) helps you ensure coding consistency. It also reduces human error as developers don’t have to write code from scratch.

Along with an SDK, you can implement a microservice architecture that breaks software into multiple independent components. If one component fails, the others keep working, allowing your application to function smoothly amid failures.

Your app will be even more reliable if you optimize its scalability, making sure your resources increase or decrease based on demand. You can use AWS Auto Scaling to automatically add more servers as demand increases and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to distribute the traffic equally among servers. This way, your app will keep working even if a server slows down or fails.

Cost optimization

Optimizing your AWS costs means only paying for the resources you need and use. Best practices that can help you optimize AWS costs include:

  • Analyzing costs 

  • Identifying cost-saving opportunities

  • Practicing spending accountability among your teams

  • Using cost-effective resources

AWS Cost Explorer helps you track and analyze your AWS spending, making it easier to right-size your resources. You can combine this tool with AWS Budgets to set fixed or variable monthly cost limits. The service monitors all costs in your AWS account and sends alerts when you’re approaching or exceeding your pre-defined budget.

You can also use AWS Tagging policies to identify which team or workload is responsible for specific resource costs and assign or distribute resources to appropriate users to promote accountability. For instance, you can label resources with tags like Marketing, Ops, and Development and then filter your cost report using these tags to track spending and find cost-saving opportunities. 

To reduce costs further, use lower-cost resource tiers or alternative pricing models. For example, you can subscribe to annual Savings Plans to use EC2 instances (virtual servers) at a discounted price rather than opting for a pay-as-you-go model. You can also optimize storage costs by keeping rarely accessed data in more affordable storage tiers like AWS Glacier.

Sustainability

Sustainability best practices aim to help you reduce the environmental impact of your operations, especially in terms of energy consumption. Key practices include:

  • Energy-efficient region selection

  • Scaling and sharing resources to save energy

  • Optimizing the amount of hardware you need for provisioning and deployment 

The Region (geographical location) from which you launch your AWS resources, like EC2, affects your operation’s performance, cost, and carbon footprint. To reduce the environmental impact of your cloud resources without compromising their performance, run your workloads from energy-efficient Regions like London or Stockholm, as these locations use significantly more renewable energy.

You can also implement sustainability best practices by:

  • Scaling resources efficiently: Use Auto Scaling to adjust resources based on demand and remove unused ones to reduce waste

  • Maximizing serverless solutions: Leverage AWS Fargate to maximize resource use by sharing serverless containers with other AWS customers rather than managing your own physical infrastructure

  • Optimizing GPU usage: Reduce power consumption by using GPUs only when necessary and turning them off automatically during periods of inactivity

Performance optimization

Optimizing the overall performance of your AWS workload requires monitoring your resources, automating processes, and regularly reviewing your setup. Here’s how you can do that:

Tips & Best practices

Automate your setup

Use Infrastructure as code (IaC) to provision your computing infrastructure instead of doing it manually. With AWS CloudFormation, you can create a template containing the AWS resources you need and let the tool configure the resources instead of managing them yourself.

Deploy updates quickly

Rely on the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline to build, test, and deploy code automatically when a developer changes it.

Track metrics

Track technical metrics like how long it takes for a page to load and business metrics like the cost of handling user requests to improve system performance and cost-efficiency.

Test system performance

After your code passes the initial test, proving it won’t crash, you will automatically set up a new testing environment for performance tests like benchmarks to measure how your system performs under standard workloads.

Simulate real traffic

Create scripts simulating user interaction with your application to test how the system handles various workloads. You can generate workloads cheaply using Spot Instances—spare computing resources AWS offers at lower costs.

Use real-time monitoring

Implement AWS CloudWatch dashboards to monitor your resources in a single view to detect failures easily.

Visualize your architecture

Use AWS architecture diagrams to visualize your application infrastructure and spot issues quickly.

You can visualize your entire AWS infrastructure and design it according to AWS architecture best practices using a tool with robust diagramming capabilities like Miro.

How to implement AWS architecture best practices with Miro

You can easily apply AWS architecture best practices to your workloads using Miro—an Innovation Workspace with advanced AWS architecture diagramming capabilities. It allows you to draw accurate cloud infrastructure diagrams on intuitive boards to visualize your AWS cloud setup, align it with AWS’s Well-Architected Framework principles, and share the diagrams with your team.

Miro’s diagramming tool helps you apply AWS architecture best practices like security, cost optimization, scalability, and overall operational excellence with powerful features like:

  • Security and Compliance: To enhance your cloud architecture security measures, you can implement features like normalized audit logs and user access controls. They help you implement security best practices effectively, ensuring your AWS resources are protected from unauthorized access.

  • AWS Cost Calculator: The feature allows you to estimate AWS resource costs, plan your AWS spending, and identify cost-saving opportunities directly within your Miro board. You can use the calculator to apply cost optimization best practices to your AWS cloud architecture.

  • AWS Cloud View app: You can use this tool to generate AWS infrastructure diagrams by importing data from your AWS account. The app can simplify applying scalability and reliability best practices by letting you visualize your resources and scale them up or down as needed.

  • AWS shape pack: This feature lets you visualize each component of your AWS architecture by using standardized AWS shapes from a vast library. You can then drag and drop the desired shapes across your Miro board.

  • Diagram focus mode: It offers advanced diagramming tools like a curated toolbar, layers, and the option to update alignment and distribution.

  • Real-time and async collaboration: You can streamline team collaboration in Miro using live workshops, interactive presentations, and async Talktracks. This allows you to collectively plan the cloud infrastructure that aligns with AWS architecture best practices and your business goals.

Create accurate AWS diagrams without drawing them from scratch by choosing from Miro’s 13+ AWS diagramming templates or 26+ templates pre-designed to simplify cloud architecture diagram creation. Start with the AWS Architecture Diagramming Template, customize it to your needs, and visualize your AWS components with symbols, icons, and arrows.

Visualize and optimize your cloud architecture with Miro

Sign up for Miro’s free Business trial and use its powerful AWS features to design a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure in line with the principles of the Well-Architected Framework. To understand exactly how Miro can help you align your cloud architecture with the Well-Architected principles, check out our webinar.

Want to see a real-life example of how businesses use Miro to visualize their AWS architecture? Take a look at how a database management system company—ClickHouse—leveraged Miro’s tools to apply AWS architecture best practices. 

Join our 90M+ users today

Join thousands of teams using Miro to do their best work yet.
accenture.svgbumble.svgdelloite.svgdocusign.svgcontentful.svgasos.svgpepsico.svghanes.svghewlett packard.svgdropbox.svgmacys.svgliberty mutual.svgtotal.svgwhirlpool.svgubisoft.svgyamaha.svgwp engine.svg
accenture.svgbumble.svgdelloite.svgdocusign.svgcontentful.svgasos.svgpepsico.svghanes.svghewlett packard.svgdropbox.svgmacys.svgliberty mutual.svgtotal.svgwhirlpool.svgubisoft.svgyamaha.svgwp engine.svg