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Operational Excellence
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- Resources have identified owners
- Processes and procedures have identified owners
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- Mechanisms exist to identify responsibility and ownership
- Mechanisms exist to request additions, changes, and exceptions
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- Executive Sponsorship
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Security
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- Evaluate and implement new security services and features regularly
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- Build a program that embeds security ownership in workload teams
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Reliability
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- How do you ensure sufficient gap between quotas and maximum usage to accommodate failover?
- How do you automate quota management?
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- How do you enforce non-overlapping private IP address ranges in all private address spaces?
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- Monitor end-to-end tracing of requests through your system
- Conduct reviews regularly
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- Automate responses (Real-time processing and alarming)
- Send notifications (Real-time processing and alarming)
- Define and calculate metrics (Aggregation)
- Monitor End-to-End Tracing of Requests Through Your System
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- Monitor all components of the workload to detect failures
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- Automate healing on all layers
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Cost Optimization
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- Establish ownership of cost optimization
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- Perform cost analysis for different usage over time
- Analyze all components of this workload
- Perform a thorough analysis of each component
- Select components of this workload to optimize cost in line with organization priorities
- Perform cost analysis for different usage over time
- Select software with cost effective licensing
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Performance
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- Learn about and understand available cloud services and features
- Evaluate how trade-offs impact customers and architecture efficiency
- Use guidance from your cloud provider or an appropriate partner to learn about architecture patterns and best practices
- Factor cost into architectural decisions
- Use policies and reference architectures
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- Use purpose-built data store that best support your data access and storage requirements
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- Implement data access patterns that utilize caching
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- Understand how networking impacts performance
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- Choose appropriate dedicated connectivity or VPN for your workload
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- Choose network protocols to improve performance
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- Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure workload health and performance
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- Review metrics at regular intervals
- Load test your workload
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- Keep your workload and services up-to-date
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Sustainability
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- Optimize geographic placement of workloads based on their networking requirements
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- Stop the creation and maintenance of unused assets
- Optimize team member resources for activities performed
- Implement buffering or throttling to flatten the demand curve
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- Optimize software and architecture for asynchronous and scheduled jobs
- Remove or refactor workload components with low or no use
- Optimize areas of code that consume the most time or resources
- Optimize impact on devices and equipment
- Use software patterns and architectures that best support data access and storage patterns
- Remove unneeded or redundant data
- Use technologies that support data access and storage patterns
- Use policies to manage the lifecycle of your datasets
- Use shared file systems or storage to access common data
- Back up data only when difficult to recreate
- Use elasticity and automation to expand block storage or file system
- Minimize data movement across networks
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- Articles coming soon
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Configure and right-size compute resources
PostedDecember 20, 2024
UpdatedDecember 20, 2024
ByKevin McCaffrey
Configuring and right-sizing compute resources is essential for matching your workload’s performance requirements. This practice helps prevent under-utilization of resources, which can waste costs, as well as over-utilization, which can lead to performance degradation. Proper selection ensures optimal performance efficiency in the AWS cloud environment.
Best Practices
- Evaluate Workload Requirements: Assess performance metrics, scaling patterns, and expected traffic to determine the right instance types and sizes. This proactive evaluation allows you to optimize performance and cost by selecting compute resources that best fit the workload’s needs.
- Utilize Monitoring Tools: Employ AWS CloudWatch or third-party monitoring tools to observe performance trends and resource utilization over time. This data will guide you in making informed decisions about adjusting compute resources to meet changing demands.
Supporting Questions
- Are you regularly monitoring resource utilization against workload performance metrics?
Roles and Responsibilities
- Cloud Architect: Responsible for defining the compute resource requirements based on application design and use cases, ensuring alignment with performance goals.
- DevOps Engineer: In charge of implementing performance monitoring and scalability solutions that adjust compute resources as needed, ensuring efficient performance.
Artifacts
- Compute Optimizer Reports: AWS Compute Optimizer provides recommendations for optimal compute resource configurations, based on your usage patterns and needs.
- Performance Monitoring Dashboards: Custom dashboards can be created in AWS CloudWatch to visualize and analyze the performance and utilization of compute resources.
Cloud Services
AWS
- Amazon EC2: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows you to dynamically scale your compute capacity and provides the flexibility to choose instance types that match your application’s needs.
- AWS Lambda: AWS Lambda enables you to run code in response to events without provisioning or managing servers, automatically adjusting compute resources according to the workload.
- Amazon ECS/EKS: Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) allow for efficient management of containerized applications, scaling to meet demand while optimizing compute resource usage.
Question: How do you select and use compute resources in your workload?
Pillar: Performance Efficiency (Code: PERF)
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