Operational Excellence

Introduction

You are a Solutions Architect working for AnyCompany, a retail business. One of the main apps for the company is a product catalog; a web application recently migrated to the AWS Cloud from the on-premises environment. Even though the application is functional, it is crucial to have an architecture with best practices applied, because the business is growing. As part of the Well-Architected practitioners team, you are looking for an architecture that meets the new performance requirements, mitigates risks, and saves money. Automation is also a fundamental part of the solution. The following is the initial architecture. Your mission is to improve upon it by applying some of the Well-Architected principles, according to the company’s needs.

Architecture review

You proposed doing a Well-Architected Framework Review to better understand the current status and needs. After that review, you identified some insights, the most relevant of which are listed below:

• Most of the operational tasks are performed manually. AnyCompany wants to automate the process to provide visibility into some important performance metrics, like memory or disk utilization. Additionally, a centralized log monitoring for DB and App is needed.
• A highly available architecture is required for the product catalog application.
• Security is a top priority. The more insights available related to this topic, the better.
• They are not sure about the decision that they made when they chose a t2.micro instance to run the application. Performance is something that they do not want to sacrifice. AnyCompany people want to do some stress tests for the application, especially because they are expecting an increase in the demand on the application in the near future.
• Cost matters. Some applications are not using approved instance types in accordance with AnyCompany’s architecture standard. This has been driving unnecessary cost due to over-provisioned resources in non-production environment

The information above is your starting point to help enhancing the architecture and achieving organization objectives. You may identify more opportunities for improvement in this architecture but, for the purposes of the workshop, just focus on these findings.

Target Architecture

The information above is your starting point to help enhancing the architecture and achieving organization objectives. You may identify more opportunities for improvement in this architecture but, for the purposes of the workshop, just focus on these findings.