Module 9: Cloud Architecture — Summary
AWS Academy Cloud Foundations · Student Guide Summary
Module Overview
This module covers three main topics: the AWS Well-Architected Framework, Reliability & High Availability
concepts, and AWS Trusted Advisor. It uses a running case study (AnyCompany Corporation) to practice
applying the framework's questions to a real architecture.
Section 1 — AWS Well-Architected Framework
A guide for designing cloud infrastructures that are secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient. It provides a
consistent way to evaluate architectures and best practices developed from reviewing thousands of customer
architectures.
The Six Pillars
• Operational Excellence: Run and monitor systems to deliver business value; automate operations, make
small reversible changes, anticipate failure, learn from events.
• Security: Protect information, systems, and assets. Strong identity foundation, traceability, defense in depth,
automate security, protect data, keep people away from data, prepare for incidents.
• Reliability: Ensure a workload performs its function correctly and consistently. Auto-recover from failure, test
recovery procedures, scale horizontally, stop guessing capacity, manage change via automation.
• Performance Efficiency: Use IT resources efficiently. Democratize advanced tech, go global in minutes, use
serverless, experiment often, consider mechanical sympathy.
• Cost Optimization: Avoid unnecessary costs. Implement cloud financial management, adopt a consumption
model, measure efficiency, stop undifferentiated heavy lifting, analyze expenditure.
• Sustainability: Added in 2021 — minimize the environmental impact of running cloud workloads (covered
separately; not detailed in this module).
Pillar Organization
Each pillar has: a Best Practice Area (e.g., Identity and Access Management), a Question (e.g., 'How do you
manage credentials and authentication?'), Question Context, and a list of Best Practices to follow.
Case Study: AnyCompany Corporation
A 3D-printed-cityscape company preparing for investment/IPO due diligence. Its architecture has three
departments — Fly and Snap (image capture/preprocessing using EC2, S3, an RDBMS on EC2, and physical
tape backups), Show and Sell (customer-facing website with Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, S3 assets,
an order service, and SQS queues), and Make and Ship (3D rendering fleet, print queue, and an on-premises
print conductor). The module uses this architecture as a running exercise to apply Well-Architected questions
across all five pillars.
AWS Well-Architected Tool
A free tool in the AWS Management Console that reviews your workload against the Framework, answers a
series of pillar-based questions, and delivers a step-by-step improvement action plan.
Section 2 — Reliability and Availability
"Everything fails, all the time" — Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon. Architects must plan for failure using two key
concepts: reliability and availability.
Reliability
The probability that an entire system (hardware + firmware + software) will function as intended for a specified
period. Measured using Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) = total time in service / number of failures,
where MTBF = Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) + Mean Time To Repair (MTTR).
Availability
The percentage of time a system operates normally (normal operation time / total time). Commonly expressed as
a percentage of uptime per year, or in "number of 9s" (e.g., five 9s = 99.999% availability).
Availability Max Disruption/Year Example Applications
99% 3 days 15 hours Batch processing, data extraction/transfer
99.9% 8 hours 45 min Internal tools (knowledge mgmt, tracking)
99.95% 4 hours 22 min Online commerce, point of sale
99.99% 52 minutes Video delivery, broadcast systems
99.999% 5 minutes ATM transactions, telecom systems
Three Factors That Influence Availability
• Fault Tolerance: built-in redundancy so the app keeps working even if some components fail
(hardware-level; doesn't fix software failures).
• Scalability: ability to accommodate increased capacity needs without redesign; contributes to but doesn't
guarantee availability.
• Recoverability: ability to restore service quickly, without data loss, after a catastrophic event.
Note: higher availability generally means higher cost — balance the improvement against the benefit to users.
Section 3 — AWS Trusted Advisor
An online tool that gives real-time guidance to help provision resources following AWS best practices, by
scanning your entire AWS environment.
Five Recommendation Categories
• Cost Optimization: eliminate unused/idle resources, suggest reserved capacity commitments.
• Performance: check service limits, provisioned throughput, overutilized instances.
• Security: close security gaps, enable AWS security features, review permissions (e.g., MFA on root, IAM
password policy, open security groups).
• Fault Tolerance: Auto Scaling, health checks, Multi-AZ deployments, backups (e.g., missing EBS
snapshots).
• Service Limits: flags usage above 80% of a service quota.
Each check reports a status (green/yellow/red), the problem, relevant environment details, the best practice, and
a recommended action — e.g. a red "MFA on Root Account" alert means MFA isn't enabled and the action is to
activate an MFA device.
Overall Key Takeaways
• The Well-Architected Framework = 6 pillars, each with its own design principles and best practices, used to
evaluate and improve cloud architectures.
• Reliability (MTBF) and Availability (% uptime) are related but distinct; both are shaped by fault tolerance,
scalability, and recoverability.
• AWS Trusted Advisor gives real-time, actionable recommendations across cost, performance, security, fault
tolerance, and service limits — useful as soon as you start implementing.