MontyCloud DAY2 Supports the April 2023 Release of AWS Well Architected Framework

As a Software Partner in the AWS Well-Architected Partner Program, MontyCloud offers an automated solution for AWS Well-Architected Framework reviews (WAFR). MontyCloud’s automation-first approach enables customers to efficiently verify over 400+ best practices, simplify remediations, and enhance the security posture of workloads in a few clicks. 

Recently, MontyCloud was recognized as a launch partner for the AWS Cloud Operations Competency. The Competency highlights partners that streamline end to end cloud operations for customers. As an industry leading Autonomous CloudOps platform, MontyCloud is thrilled to continue innovating on behalf of customers to simplify AWS Cloud Operations. 

In this blog, I address the April 10, 2023 announcement from AWS that shared updates to the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Additionally, I am excited to announce that MontyCloud DAY2 now includes support for these new updates, along with 300+ remediation playbooks.

April 2023 Well-Architected Framework Pillar Updates from AWS

1. Operational Excellence Pillar: New best practices emphasize the importance of implementing support plans for production workloads and establishing customer communication strategies during service disruptions.

2. Security Pillar: AWS introduces the Application Security (AppSec) area featuring eight additional best practices to offer guidance on tools, testing, and organizational approaches for secure software development, testing, and deployment.

3. Reliability Pillar: The latest updates include a best practice for designing workloads to achieve availability targets and maintain uptime SLAs, as well as incorporating the resilience shared responsibility model in the introductory section.

4. Cost Optimization Pillar: Enhanced best practices focus on integrating operations automation for cost-optimization initiatives and implementing data-retention policies.

5. Sustainability Pillar: The updated guidelines provide a structured process for selecting regions, tools to optimize services, and methods to boost resource utilization within the AWS Cloud.

6. Performance Efficiency Pillar: The updates address key aspects of cloud architecture, emphasizing the importance of selecting the most suitable compute, storage, database, and networking solutions to optimize performance. 

Best Practices Updates:

In this release, a total of 113 best practices have been updated with more prescriptive guidance in various areas to enhance specific business outcomes in AWS using reusable architecture patterns. The updates include:

1. Operational Excellence: 22 best practices revisions.
2. Security: 18 best practices revisions.
3. Reliability: 14 best practices revisions.
4. Performance Efficiency: 10 best practices revisions.
5. Cost Optimization: 22 best practices revisions.
6. Sustainability: 27 best practices revisions.

Additionally, 14 new best practices have been introduced to provide further guidance. These additions are aimed at achieving specific business outcomes:

1. Operational Excellence:

1. • Enable support plans for production workloads

2. Security:

   • Share resources securely with a third party

   • Perform regular penetration testing

   • Deploy software programmatically

   • Regularly assess security properties of the pipelines

   • Build a program that embeds security ownership in workload teams

   • Train for application security

   • Automate testing throughout the development and release lifecycle

   • Manual code reviews

   • Centralize services for packages and dependencies

3. Cost Optimization:

   • Perform automations for operations

   • Enforce data retention policies

4. Reliability:

   • Architect your product to meet availability targets and uptime service level agreements (SLAs)

5. Sustainability:

   • Implement buffering or throttling to flatten the demand curve

The latest Well-Architected updates and additional automation are available in MontyCloud DAY2

The latest updates in this release are already available via MontyCloud DAY2, In just a few clicks customers can run the latest version of WAFR assessments and perform remediations from within MontyCloud’s No-Code interface.

We encourage you to try MontyCloud DAY2 to you save time and money while achieving a well-architected posture for your workloads.

You can get started with MontyCloud in just 10 minutes or you can request a demo below!