I focus on the cost and benefits of the new architecture because everyone always likes the business view.
Migration
When planning a cloud migration, I follow a robust process to capture your core requirements, existing processes, dependencies and roles. I start by analysing the existing landscape and establish the current baseline covering topics like:
- Team Skill Set
- Is this considered a “legacy” migration?
- Primary tech stack in use
- OS/Programming Language/Versions/Code repo in use
- Server license status
- Full vs Hybrid migration
- Existing security-related accreditations held (Cyber Essentials, ISO 27001)
- Any internal system dependencies?
- What isn’t in scope for migration?
I then design and build the architecture according to the security design principles in the Well-Architected framework, matching your migration requirements. Want to find out more?
Security Audit/Improvement
As a Solutions Architect, security is my primary concern and I know how to configure the multi-tiered points of security that can be applied across every cloud resource. Using a custom security check-list as part of my audit process I provide you with recommendations on how your cloud security can be improved.
I can also advise on the security improvements needed to meet the requirement of ISO 27001 or Cyber Essentials. Some examples of the main points of security I can configure are:
- IAM Policies & Roles: not just for your people, but also for cloud resources
- Security Groups – a type of stateful firewall which wraps around every cloud resource
- NACL – full IP control at the edge of a network boundary
- Proactive threat detection using AWS GuardDuty
- Intelligent vulnerability checking of your code, containers and OS’s using using AWS Inspector
- Automated patching
- Protection against DDoS, Cross-site scripting, SQL injection attacks using AWS WAF & Shield
- Configuration compliance audit & automated remediation actions using AWS Config, EventBridge and Lambda
Cost reduction
There are many ways to optimise cloud costs, and as part of my Cloud Cost Reduction Service I analyse your current architecture and then advise you with a Cost Reduction Plan.
The Cost Reduction Plan is tailored to your immediate environment, but will go beyond this if significant cost savings could be realised with a redesign of the architecture while maintaining the services you rely on. Some of the areas of cost reduction I can implement are:
- Cost savings through Auto Scaling (EC2, DynamoDB)
- Organisation-wide resource discounts & sharing using AWS Organisations
- S3 & EFS Lifecycle Policies
- Traffic routing between your VPC and AWS public services
- Compression & filtering of data stored in S3
- Minimising egress traffic network cost
- Caching commonly accessed data using CloudFront, ElastiCache, DACS
- RDS cost trick
Better by design Architecture
I design & build architecture according to the Six Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected framework and using my own experience of maximising the benefits of AWS cloud services:
- operational excellence
- security
- reliability
- performance efficiency
- cost optimization
- sustainability
Having the right architecture in place opens up a number of benefits, and provides a solid and predictable foundation that you can measure performance against. This will help you to:
- Stop guessing your capacity needs!
- Easily test systems at production scale
- Automate deployments to make architectural experimentation easier
- Deploy dev stacks in multiple environments e.g. lambda, EC2, ECS
- Allow for evolutionary architectures (see this)
- Design your solution based on dynamically shifting requirements
- Leverage Data-first architectures
- Improve through game days
As an example, a retail website can be tested by simulating a load which represents a flash sale day. This puts pressure on the architecture, and if the architecture is wrong, it will skew the results leading to flawed business decisions. Talk to me about the well-architected framework and the benefits it can deliver for you.