Achieving Frugal Architecture using the AWS Well-Architected Framework guidance

As part of the re:Invent 2023 keynote, Dr. Werner Vogels introduced the Frugal Architect mindset. This mindset emphasizes the importance of continuous learning, curiosity, and regular revision of architectural choices with a focus on cost and sustainability. Cost and sustainability should be treated as critical non-functional requirements, alongside factors like security, compliance, and performance. The Frugal Architect approach involves measuring and optimizing cost at every stage of the development process, which allows for innovation in parallel with promoting responsible resource usage. In the rapidly-evolving technology landscape, builders should adopt the Frugal Architect mindset to balance innovation with cost efficiency and environmental sustainability.

This blog discusses how the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework (operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability) align with the seven Frugal Architect laws. It demonstrates how adhering to the principles and best practices outlined in these pillars can help architects and builders effectively implement the Frugal Architect laws in their projects. The Well-Architected Framework provides a comprehensive set of guidelines that embed the concepts of frugality, efficiency, and cost effectiveness, which are the core tenets of the Frugal Architect laws. By following the Framework’s pillars, architects can build secure, reliable, efficient, and cost-optimized systems and promote sustainability.

Make Cost a Non-functional Requirement (Law 1)

Non-functional requirements are criteria that evaluate a system’s operation instead of its specific features or functionality. This includes aspects like accessibility, availability, scalability, security, portability, maintainability, and compliance. However, one crucial non-functional requirement that is often overlooked is cost. Consider implications early on and throughout the design, development, and operation of your systems. Organizations can strike a balance between desired features, time-to-market, and operational efficiency through early prioritization of cost considerations. The Frugal Architect argues that you should treat cost as a fundamental non-functional requirement that should be given upfront consideration when planning and initiating system development projects.

The Cost Optimization Pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework provides guidance on how to optimize costs when using AWS Cloud services. It emphasizes treating cost as a key requirement, not an afterthought. The main principles focus on the importance of a robust financial management processes, adoption of a cloud consumption model that allows for flexible scaling and pay-per-use billing, continual measurement of outputs against costs to optimize efficiency, use of managed services to minimize operational overhead, and implementation of transparent cost attribution to tie cloud spending to revenue sources and workloads. Organizations that follow these practices can effectively manage and optimize their costs and benefit from the scalability and agility of cloud computing.

These cost optimization principles can help organizations maximize the financial benefits of using the AWS Cloud and avoid wasteful spending. Cost optimization is an ongoing process that includes rightsizing, higher output for the same cost, and use of the most cost-effective AWS services. The pillar promotes a disciplined approach to evaluate trade-offs between cost and other optimization areas like performance or reliability. Overall, you can use this pillar to make informed decisions to provision and operate AWS services cost-effectively.

Systems that Last Align Cost to Business (Law 2)

The durability and longevity of a system are closely tied to how well its costs align with the underlying business model. During the creation of a system, consider revenue sources and profit drivers. The key is to identify the primary dimension or aspect that generates revenue, and then verify that the system architecture supports and optimizes for that revenue-generating dimension. Essentially, revenue and profitability considerations should be the primary forces behind cost decisions in system design.

The AWS Well-Architected Cost Optimization Pillar provides practices and guidance for organizations to accurately monitor their AWS costs and usage. This visibility helps users understand the profitability of different business units and products, which facilitates informed decisions on resource allocation across the organization. Organizations can implement these practices to gain insights into their AWS spending patterns, which aids in development of effective cost optimization strategies. Overall, accurate expenditure analysis and attribution are crucial for organizations to optimize cloud costs, measure ROI, and make data-driven resource allocation decisions.

It’s important to accurately identify and attribute cloud costs to specific workloads. The cloud allows for transparent cost attribution, which helps organizations link costs to individual revenue streams and workload owners. This granular cost attribution data empowers workload owners to measure return on investment (ROI) for their workloads. With detailed cost information, workload owners can optimize resource utilization and reduce costs by rightsizing resources, eliminating waste, and making informed decisions. Organizations must use accurate cost attribution to understand where their cloud spending is going and verify that resources are being used efficiently across different workloads and revenue streams.

Architecting is a Series of Trade-Offs (Law 3)

Architectural decisions involve trade-offs, particularly between cost, resilience, and performance. Systems will inevitably fail, so investment in resilience is important but may impact performance. It’s important to find the right balance between technical requirements and business needs and align with risk tolerance and budget constraints. Frugality is about maximizing value, not just minimizing spend. Frugality means that you determine what you’re can pay for based on your priorities and make informed trade-off decisions. Ultimately, architectural choices require careful consideration of the tensions between different non-functional requirements.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you make architectural trade-offs through its design principles and practices across its six pillars with your business requirements in mind. As you architect workloads, you make trade-offs between pillars based on your business context. You might optimize to improve the sustainability impact and reduce cost at the expense of reliability in development environments, or for mission-critical solutions. You might optimize reliability with increased costs and sustainability impact. In ecommerce solutions, performance can affect revenue and customer propensity to buy. Security generally is not a viable trade-off against the other pillars.

Rather than optimizing for any single pillar, the Framework guides a holistic evaluation across all pillars to determine the right architectural approach. Organizations can use AWS best practices while they find the optimal balance that aligns with their unique requirements. The key is making intentional trade-off decisions instead of following any uniform approach.

Unobserved Systems Lead to Unknown Costs (Law 4)

Without proper observation and measurement, the true operational costs of a system remain hidden, and wasteful practices can persist unnoticed. Just as exposing a utility meter prompts more mindful usage, visibility increases into costs can drive more sustainable behaviors. While implementing comprehensive monitoring requires upfront investment, the long-term benefits of conserving resources and optimizing efficiency make it a worthwhile endeavor. Ultimately, you should maintain cost awareness to foster a culture of responsible, sustainable practices.

The Operational Excellence Pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework emphasizes the importance of observability to gain actionable insights into workloads. This involves creation of key performance indicators (KPIs) and use of observability data telemetry to comprehensively understand workload behavior, performance, reliability, cost, and health. Organizations can implement observability best practices to make informed decisions and take prompt action when business outcomes are at risk due to issues with workload operation. Observability data provides visibility into the current state and helps identify areas for improvement. This means that organizations can be proactive in performance optimization, reliability enhancement, and cost reduction based on the actionable insights derived from observability telemetry data. Overall, observability is crucial for maintenance of operational excellence through the use of data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement of workloads.

Overall, monitoring guidance is a core component across multiple pillars of the Well-Architected Framework, as it helps organizations effectively manage and optimize their cloud workloads. For more detail on the monitoring principles of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, see Cost-Aware Architectures Implement Cost Controls (Law 5).

Cost-Aware Architectures Implement Cost Controls (Law 5)

The key aspects of frugal architecture combine granular controls with robust monitoring to identify areas for optimization. This helps you optimize costs and maintain a good user experience. With a robust monitoring system, you can take action where improvements are needed.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework aligns with the concept of frugality, which focuses on maximizing value rather than just minimizing spending. The Framework helps businesses achieve maximum value by making architectural choices that meet their specific requirements.

The Cost Optimization Pillar emphasizes the continual monitoring of usage and costs to identify opportunities for efficiency improvements and cost savings. This includes expenditure analysis, adoption of consumption-based models, and implementation of cloud financial management practices.

The Security Pillar, Reliability Pillar, and Performance Efficiency Pillar reinforce the importance of monitoring systems, workloads, and costs in real-time to maintain security, automatically recover from failures, and optimize performance relative to cost.

The Sustainability Pillar focuses on measurement of a workload’s current and forecasted environmental impact. It recommends continual evaluation of new hardware and software offerings that can reduce the environmental footprint.

Overall, monitoring guidance spans multiple Well-Architected pillars to maximize value through optimization of cost, performance, security, reliability, and sustainability.

Cost Optimization is Incremental (Law 6)

Cost efficiency is a continuous process, not a one-time goal. Regularly monitor your systems to identify inefficient patterns and areas for optimization. Revisit and refine systems periodically to find additional opportunities for improvement and further reduce costs over time.

The Cost Optimization Pillar covers principles like analysis and attribution of expenditure, measurement of overall efficiency, adoption of a consumption model, and implementation of cloud financial management practices.

Additionally, the Operational Excellence Pillar provides principles that apply not just to cost optimization but all pillars. These include observability for actionable insights, safe automation where possible, frequent small reversible changes, frequent refinement of operations procedures, anticipation of failure, and documentation and distribution of learning from operational events and metrics.

Organizations can follow these AWS Well-Architected Framework principles and their practices to continuously improve their cloud architectures and operations and optimize costs effectively.

Unchallenged Success Leads to Assumptions (Law 7)

We should continue to reevaluate past approaches, even those that were previously successful. Just because something worked before does not mean that it is still the best method. Grace Hopper, a computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral, cautioned against blind adherence to tradition, saying that “we’ve always done it this way” is a dangerous mindset. We must be willing to question the old ways and explore new and potentially better methods.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework advocates for an evolutionary architecture approach to system design. Traditional architectures are often designed as static, with only a few major version updates during the system’s lifetime. However, as businesses and requirements change over time, initial architectural decisions can limit the ability to adapt and evolve the system. Cloud computing enables capabilities like automated testing and lower-risk design changes, which allows systems to evolve continually rather than being constrained by the original design. An evolutionary architecture positions businesses to take advantage of new innovations and changes as part of standard practice. Rather than being locked into original architectural choices, an evolutionary approach fosters ongoing adaptation and modernization as requirements shift. This contrasts with traditional fixed architectures that make it difficult to evolve over time and provides greater flexibility to evolve systems iteratively.

The Operational Excellence Pillar includes implementation of observability to understand system behavior, safe automation of processes, frequent but reversible changes, regular refinement of operations procedures, proactive anticipation potential failures proactively, and distribution of learnings from operational events and metrics to drive continuous improvement.

Overall, the Well-Architected Framework provides guidance on evolutionary architecture and operations processes to effectively manage increasing software complexity over time.

Conclusion

Frugality is about maximizing value, rather than just minimizing costs. Following AWS Well-Architected Framework best practices regarding security, reliability, and operational excellence can help realize frugal yet robust architectures. True frugality involves optimizing costs by aligning spending with areas that deliver the highest business value and impact. The Well-Architected Framework provides guidance for making architectural decisions that increase efficiency, lower risks, and maximize return on cloud investments. This involves determining priorities, understanding sources of value, and making informed trade-off decisions based on those priorities. It’s important to avoid indiscriminate cost-cutting and instead focus on resources on what matters most to drive value for the organization. By following Well-Architected best practices, companies can practice frugality in a strategic way that balances optimization with business goals.

Start your Frugal Architecture journey with AWS Well-Architected today by reading the documentation or visiting the AWS Well-Architected Tool in the console.