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Well-Architected Framework:Challenges and Considerations

Last Updated:Sep 25, 2023

Business First

The performance planning of the architecture always serves the business and needs to be based on actual business demands. Rigorous business evaluation and prediction are very necessary, so we cannot just blindly pursue high performance.

Performance Trade-offs

The performance planning of an architecture always serves the business and should be based on real business requirements. Thorough business assessment and prediction are essential, and blindly pursuing high performance should be avoided.

  • Cost: The relationship between performance and cost is usually not linear. The performance breakthroughs at various bottleneck points often lead to a step-by-step increase in cost. The cost differences between different products or product types can be considerable. It is necessary to balance and choose the right solution from aspects like specification, product combination, and business characteristics. One must avoid imbalances in the overall design that results in unnecessary costs because of the single-minded pursuit of one aspect.

  • Stability: High availability and disaster recovery considerations will introduce redundancy in architecture and resources. Actions such as backup will reduce the performance commitment of resources to the workload.

  • Security: Performance that is too poor or exceptionally good may both pose a challenge to the supporting security services in the architecture. For example, higher performance requirements mean significantly higher security costs. The business fluctuations caused by poor performance will introduce more alarms and increase the input into SIEM operation and maintenance.

  • Operability: On the one hand, performance optimization in architecture usually introduces some product services to decouple specific resource dependencies, but this will also increase the complexity of the architecture. On the other hand, high performance puts higher demands on business system testing complexity, monitoring precision, SIEM link processing capabilities, and various operation and maintenance operations.

  • Scalability: Elastic scaling is a key topic when talking about performance architecture, and the scale and speed of support for scaling are key to business continuity and stability. Different requirements may require different product combinations and system designs and reflect differences in many other aspects. These also need to be comprehensively considered with business characteristics.

Continuous Monitoring and Performance Optimization

Generally speaking, high-performance system construction and performance optimization are not one-off tasks but are continuously iterated and optimized along with business operations. This is an important guarantee for the business to run smoothly and continuously and needs to be included in the domain of daily IT governance.

Shifting Testing Left

The agility of deploying cloud services and the significantly reduced construction and trial and error costs of architecture have not only led to a shift toward earlier stages in system testing but also stress testing, conducting stress tests in earlier stages and smaller business scenarios. This way, as early as possible, product specifications and combinations can be evaluated and adjusted, thereby greatly reducing the complexity of stress test optimization after the entire deployment is completed.