The Well-Architected Framework

The Well-Architected Framework is a set of principles that AWS recommends as a way of evaluating the pros and cons of designing and implementing applications in the cloud. The framework is divided into the following five pillars: reliability, performance efficiency, security, cost optimization, and operational excellence. You can think of these pillars as goals. In this section, we’ll briefly describe each of these goals at a high level. Later in the chapter, you’ll complete some exercises to experience firsthand how to achieve these goals when dealing with real-world scenarios.

Reliability

Reliability means avoiding the complete failure of your application. Depending on how it’s architected, your application may depend on many different types of resources, including compute, storage, database, and networking.

Avoiding the complete failure of your application requires two things. First, you must strive to avoid the failure of the resources...