Day 45 of 45 Days of Well-Architected 2

Terrifying couple of days working out how WA2 educates and improves architecture. Starting point: minimal AWS knowledge and the simplest useful stack — an S3 bucket for storing data.

Why terrifying? Uncharted territory. How do we shift left on Well-Architected? How do we guide engineers as they build?

Walking through the screenshots: • Our very naive template, short and sweet.

• AWS Toolkit complains extensively — template grows from 12 to 69 lines. No understanding of intent means it applies blanket rules. Doesn’t account for new service defaults. Forces creation of a logging bucket, then demands versioning and logging for that too! First hint that lacking intent or graph analysis causes problems.

• WA2 flags the missing intent. We haven’t indicated what’s this bucket’s purpose, so it’s impossible to judge if it’s good architecture. WA2 knows that a bucket is a form of “store”, and that stores should have intent against them — it would do the same for an ebs volume, efs etc

• WA2’s approach: context-based education via hover tooltips. Not just what to do, but why. Shifting left on best practice.

• Following WA2 guidance, we add tags recording intent. Two dimensions matter: sensitivity vs criticality (not explicit in original WA). We tag it Business Critical. WA2 reacts to the inadequate protection for critical data and suggests options.

• I implement replication with deletion safeguards.

• WA2 is satisfied (limited guidance for demo) because it detects the replication that I enabled against the bucket (this is the advantage of being in the IDE, we have access to the code for the infrastucture). Ideally it should verify you’ve tested backup processes via S3 data events or CloudTrail.

Sub-second guidance transforms naive design into best practice whilst educating the engineer. No need to fill in a form, or do a manual review — WA2 has access to all the information in your template and understands what each AWS service is, and what guidence should be suggested.

𝐎𝐧𝐞 𝐤𝐞𝐲 𝐨𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲: 𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐨𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐞𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐰𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦 𝐫𝐮𝐥𝐞𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧-𝐬𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲-𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭 𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐜𝐤𝐬.

Call-to-action: is this valuable to you? what USP is missing, what sounds wrong?

VSCode extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=FigmentEngineLtd.wa2 Github repo: https://github.com/unremarkable-technology/wa2-vscode-extension