Best practice makes perfect: Why AWS best practices matter for a well-architected environment

Ensure your cloud architecture is resilient, secure and built for long-term success.

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Building in the cloud isn’t just about setting up infrastructure – it’s about doing it right, a feat which can be adhered to by following a set of best practices. Cloud provides unparalleled flexibility, enabling businesses to scale, innovate and optimise, but without a strong foundation, even the most advanced cloud environments can become costly, inefficient or vulnerable. However, by following a structured approach, businesses can ensure their cloud architecture is resilient, secure and built for long-term success. AWS calls this structure the Well-Architected Framework.

“To optimise your environment, it is important to follow a set of guidelines, or should we say, ‘best practices’, to ensure that your infrastructure is not only efficient but also secure, cost-effective and can adapt to change – making it ‘well-architected’,” explains Thenjiwe Mukwevho, Well Architected lead within BBD’s Cloud Solutions team.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is built around six key pillars that assess how well your architecture aligns with AWS best practices. These pillars help identify areas for improvement and ensure your cloud environment is built for efficiency, security and long-term success. Below, we provide a quick guide to each of these pillars and their key best practices.

Focuses on monitoring, incident response and evolving your infrastructure to meet business needs.

• Monitor performance: Use Amazon CloudWatch to track system health and operational metrics.
• Automate processes: Reduce manual errors by automating deployments and scaling.
• Refine and adapt: Regularly review your environment to keep it aligned with business goals.
• Incident management: Implement proactive detection, response and resolution strategies.

Adhering to best practices in the security pillar of the framework ensures your cloud environment is secure, compliant and resilient against threats. “Cloud security threats evolve quickly, and AWS is proactive in releasing new features, patches and security measures to combat emerging risks. Adhering to up-to-date best practices ensures your environment remains secure,” adds Mukwevho.

• Enforce least privilege: Use AWS IAM to control access.
• Encrypt data: Protect sensitive information with AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
• Detect security threats: Use AWS CloudTrail and GuardDuty for real-time monitoring.
• Have an incident response plan: Quickly identify and recover from security breaches.

Helps your systems withstand failures and meet business demands. Mukwevho suggests: “Assume failures will happen and build systems that can automatically recover. A well-architected environment ensures that your business can withstand disruptions without missing a beat.”

• Automate recovery: Implement auto-scaling and load balancing to maintain uptime.
• Plan for failures: Assume failures will happen – design for redundancy.
• Use multi-AZ and multi-region architectures: Improve availability and fault tolerance.
• Implement backups and disaster recovery: Regularly back up critical data.

Ensures you're making the best use of cloud resources as your workloads evolve.

• Choose the right resources: Select instance types based on your workload needs.
• Monitor and optimise: Use CloudWatch to track performance and make improvements.
• Scale dynamically: Implement AWS Auto Scaling to adjust resources based on demand.
• Continuously improve: Regularly refine your architecture as workloads change.

“Cloud pricing models and services are constantly refined, often offering new cost-saving features such as savings plans or reserved instances. Following best practices enables you to take full advantage of these updates to optimise your spending,” says Mukwevho. Adhering to best practices in this pillar helps you spend efficiently while maintaining performance.

• Track spending: Use AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets to monitor costs.
• Use the right pricing model: Leverage Reserved Instances, Spot Instances and Savings Plans.
• Right-size resources: Avoid over-provisioning by optimising resource allocation.
• Automate scaling: Prevent unnecessary costs with Auto Scaling.

Encourages responsible resource usage and energy efficiency.

• Right-size and optimise: Reduce unused resources and adopt serverless computing.
• Efficient storage management: Use life cycle policies to manage data storage efficiently.
• Leverage managed services: Use AWS services that prioritise sustainability by scaling resources based on demand.
• Adopt cloud-native approaches: Embrace containers, microservices and serverless architectures.

“AWS is constantly evolving, with new services, features and best practices emerging regularly. Ensuring your architecture remains optimised is an ongoing process,” explains Mukwevho.

There are multiple ways to help you stay well-architected, either on your own or with BBD’s help:

• Self-service: Use the AWS Well-Architected Tool to review workloads and get recommendations.
• Guided review: BBD’s experts walk you through an in-depth assessment and optimisation plan.
• Ongoing compliance: BBD ensures continuous well-architected compliance as part of its Managed Services.
• Enterprise-grade landing zones: BBD deploys secure, scalable AWS foundations, built well-architected from the ground up, with native or FortiGate firewall options.

At BBD, we’ve worked alongside businesses of all sizes – whether modernising legacy systems or designing cloud-first architectures – to ensure that their AWS environments are not just operational but optimised. By aligning cloud strategies with AWS best practices, BBD helps businesses achieve security, efficiency and scalability that meet their long-term objectives. Make sure your cloud is running optimally, get in touch now with BBD’s AWS cloud experts to kick off your journey to a well-architected environment.