AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviews
Akkodis engineers were there when the Well-Architected Framework was conceived — we didn’t just learn the framework, we helped establish it
The Well-Architected Framework has been at the core of the Akkodis consulting approach to clients for nearly a decade (since 2014), and has resulted in client workloads that have been secure, reliable and fault-tolerant, scalable, performed efficiently, maintained with continual improvement, and cost effective: the underlying traits of the Well-Architected framework.
The Akkodis AWS Cloud Best Practice approaches (the Akkodis internal tenets of operation) have ensured Akkodis has exceeded client requirements wherever possible, with the pillars of the Well-Architected framework at the heart of these engagements.
Clients who have undertaken a Well-Architected Framework Review with Akkodis consistently report that the annual cost savings alone outweight the cost of the engagement. While many initially say cost optimisation is their focus, it is the security pillar that is frequently elevated to being a priority.
Some will remember the massive storms that hit Sydney in 2016. Swimming pools and buildings were washed away into the ocean, and one Availability Zone of the AWS Sydney Region went offline for a short period. Many clients were affected by this outage, mostly through the architectures and implementation choices they had made.
Akkodis AWS clients were not impacted in this way. Akkodis Well-Architected engineering ensured that failover was automatic and timely; systems that had to failover did so without human intervention, and the impact was measured in seconds, not hours or days.
Most AWS deployments start well — and then the cloud progreses without them. Perhaps services are deprecated, new security controls emerge, architectures that were optimal 5 years ago may carry hidden risk today.
Available to you
Akkodis is excited to offer the deep technical and operational insights to our clients, by way of conducting Well-Architected Reviews of your workloads. The Akkodis AWS Practice has some of the most experienced staff in the region, deeply certified and experienced.
Contact us to discuss how the Akkodis advanced team can help your IT teams reduce cost and risk, increase operational efficiency, reliability and performance. This is even more critical if it has been some time since you deployed a workload or previously have a Review performed more than two years ago – the AWS Cloud does not stand still, and the opportunity to optimize grows over time.
Why do a Well-Architected Framework Review
There are several reasons to do a engage Akkodis for a review:
- Mergers & Acquisitions: your organization inherits existing applications, and you want to know what the level of technical debt is in the cloud configuration
- Pre-launch: you’re about to go live with a new critical application, and you’d like a fresh set of eyes to confirm you’re ready
- Bill Shock: you received a bill that was higher than expected for a given workload, and would like to know what to do to optimise this
- Security Incident: you’d rather get your security new privately rather than on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow morning
- Annually: best practice changes over time, especially as the cloud capability itself continually improves, and you’d like to have some measure of rate of improvement from year to year (or indeed, every 3 or 6 months)
- Existing Service Team validation: check that your existing team or service provider is adequately maintaining your application and AWS cloud environment
How it works
- Pre-work: the client sends background information on the workload to the Akkodis review team
- Engagement: the client to dedicate a senior/lead engineers to work with our review team
- Post-engagement: Akkodis team writes up their findings and recommendations.
- Follow up: you remediate the workload, or engage a partner to do so for you (we would be happy to help as well!)
You’re then armed with knowledge of what has been uncovered as much as possible. The standard duration of this is less than a week.
Lenses
A lens adds additional specific perspectives into the approach across the pillars of Well-Architected. There are several standardised ones (eg; Government, AI), and we can add this into your workload review.
For other very specific workload types, we can add create custom lenses that dive deeper for the recommendations that are even more specific. For example: Ask about the Akkdois Databricks on AWS lens if you have Databricks in your environment.
The deep Akkodis experience not just in AWS, but wider IT system design, management and operations across many solutions gives us insights that can help reduce your risk.
Engage Akkodis
Not sure if your AWS environment is where it should be? A conversation costs nothing. Contact us to describe your situation and we’ll tell you honestly whether a review makes sense for you.
Contact Akkodis to find out more⧉