Most businesses are using a major cloud platform for their day-to-day operations, and according to a report by Gartner, 85% of organizations will adopt a cloud-first principle by 2025. This modern advantage means that with the convenience of a cloud platform like AWS comes new challenges and obstacles to be aware of. Similar to how I take my car for regular service to keep it running smoothly, our AWS environments need periodic reviews to ensure they’re at peak performance and offering the best possible results for our clients.
In 2024, Soliant Consulting became an AWS Well-Architected Partner Program member. While already an Advanced Tier Consulting Partner, we invested deeply into the Well-Architected Program to maximize our expertise in optimizing AWS workloads. This allows us to improve our AWS environments and offer valuable insights and guidance to our clients. As part of this program, we provide Well-Architected Reviews to assess clients’ AWS workloads against best practices. We offer these reviews at an incredibly appealing and competitive price point, ensuring our clients can access this expertise without a substantial financial burden.
A Well-Architected Review provides a consistent approach for us and our customers to evaluate and improve our cloud workloads. It’s based on six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. By examining a cloud workload through the lens of these pillars, we can identify potential risks and areas for improvement.
Through our experience, we’ve identified several common indicators that an AWS environment would benefit from a Well-Architected Review. Here are some indicators your workload may need a check-up now.
1. Security Incidents or Compliance Gaps
One of the most obvious red flags that crop up is if your organization has experienced a security breach or failed a compliance audit because of a workload in the cloud. This often points to some underlying vulnerabilities in your architecture’s security posture. The security pillar of the Well-Architected Framework focuses on protecting your information and systems. This includes concepts like:
- Applying the principle of least privilege
- Enabling traceability
- Automating security best practices
- Protecting data in transit and at rest
- Preparing for security events
A Well-Architected Review pinpoints where these areas can improve, and most importantly, it can help you avoid a security incident before it occurs. By implementing the right security controls in all layers of your architecture, you create a more secure space for your workload in AWS.
2. Frequent Service Disruptions
Other warning signs are frequent, unexpected downtime and availability issues. Ask yourself: are your AWS workloads going down more than they should? Are you getting alerts in the middle of the night?
A reliable workload automatically recovers from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically scales up computing resources to meet demand, and mitigates misconfiguration disruptions or temporary network issues. A review of your workload will result in a set of recommendations to improve its fault tolerance and availability.
We recommend strategies such as deploying to multiple Availability Zones, setting up auto-scaling, or implementing comprehensive backup and disaster recovery mechanisms. Our review aims to keep your applications online and resilient. Even if you’re facing external disruptions that you can’t control, you’re still in control of what you implement today that will keep your workload running smoothly, regardless.
3. Disproportionate Cost Increases
Since cost is often a motivation for moving to AWS, it should be concerning if your AWS bills start significantly outpacing the value you’re gaining from it. The comprehensive cost analysis that we run against your AWS account is often valuable enough for most companies working with us on a Well-Architected Review because of the instant results they get from it.
The Cost Optimization pillar focuses on identifying unnecessary costs. Our review aggressively seeks out opportunities for savings and offers recommendations for key best practices that will help you keep your costs down as much as possible going forward. These recommendations could involve:
- Right-sizing over-provisioned instances
- Using Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, or Spot Instances
- Using automation to scale resources up or down based on demand.
- Identifying idle resources that can be retired.
A proactive review of your workloads can ensure you get the maximum value out of every dollar you spend on AWS and help you avoid runaway costs before you incur them.
4. Limited Automation
Another sign your AWS workload needs a review is if your teams spend too much time on repetitive manual tasks and can’t find time to innovate. If you are faced with this issue, it’s a good indicator that your architecture could be improved.
The Operational Excellence pillar ensures that your AWS workload runs smoothly and efficiently. If you consistently have to perform manual tasks to keep things running, we’ll recommend some concepts as a solution.
- Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to manage resources
- Setting up logging and monitoring for operational events and failures
- Establishing runbooks and playbooks for incident response
- Establishing regular tests of disaster recovery and business continuity plans
- Creating a culture of continuous improvement
Your team’s efficiency and productivity can be increased by deciding to make automation improvements upfront instead of continuing to fight fires when they occur. It’s important to spend more time delivering value than you do on making fixes.
5. Scaling Difficulties
One of the major advantages of AWS is elasticity, or the ability to quickly scale resources up or down based on demand. However, your workloads can only take advantage of elasticity if you build them to scale. If you experience scalability bottlenecks or performance inefficiencies, you may benefit from some recommendations from a Well-Architected Review.
Your goal should be to enable your workloads to seamlessly handle growth while being optimally performant. This is where the Performance Efficiency pillar of the Well-Architected Framework comes into play. During a Review, your architecture is examined to identify areas where you can improve resource utilization, maintain efficiency as demand changes, and take advantage of AWS’s elasticity.
Take Action Now: Get Your Low-Cost AWS Well-Architected Review
If you’re seeing any of these warning signs in your AWS workload, let me offer you some encouragement – running a Well-Architected Review is easier than you may think, especially with our help. We’ve developed tools that can automatically assess many aspects of your environment, minimizing the initial time investment from your team. If the review uncovers high-risk issues, such as security vulnerabilities, reliability concerns, or cost inefficiencies, we can provide a clear roadmap to remediate them. We’ve helped numerous clients quickly stabilize and optimize their workloads. Plus, AWS offers service credits to help cover the cost of remediation, depending on the scenario.
Don’t wait for a minor issue to become a major problem. Take the first step toward strengthening your cloud workloads by scheduling a Well-Architected Review with our team. You’ll be amazed at how much you can benefit from improved security, reliability, performance, and cost savings. Reach out to us today to get started—we’re here to help!
