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• Episode on CI/CD with Circle CI

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In this episode, we cover the following topics:

• Pillars in depth
  • Performance Efficiency
    • "Ability to use resources efficiently to meet system requirements and maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technology evolves"
    • Design principles
      • Easy to try new advanced technologies (by letting AWS manage them, instead of standing them up yourself)
      • Go global in minutes
      • Use serverless architectures
      • Experiment more often
      • Mechanical sympathy (use the technology approach that aligns best to what you are trying to achieve)
    • Key service: CloudWatch
    • Focus areas
      • Selection
        • Services: EC2, EBS, RDS, DynamoDB, Auto Scaling, S3, VPC, Route53, DirectConnect
      • Review
        • Services: AWS Blog, AWS What's New
      • Monitoring
        • Services: CloudWatch, Lambda, Kinesis, SQS
      • Tradeoffs
        • Services: CloudFront, ElastiCache, Snowball, RDS (read replicas)
    • Best practices
      • Selection
        • Choose appropriate resource types
          • Compute, storage, database, networking
      • Trade Offs
        • Proximity and caching
  • Cost Optimization
    • "Ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point"
    • Design principles
      • Adopt a consumption model (only pay for what you use)
      • Measure overall efficiency
      • Stop spending money on data center operations
      • Analyze and attribute expenditures
      • Use managed services to reduce TCO
    • Key service: AWS Cost Explorer (with cost allocation tags)
    • Focus areas
      • Expenditure awareness
        • Services: Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, CloudWatch, SNS
      • Cost-effective resources
        • Services: Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, Cost Explorer
      • Matching supply and demand
        • Services: Auto Scaling
      • Optimizing over time
        • Services: AWS Blog, AWS What's New, Trusted Advisor
    • Key points
      • Use Trusted Advisor to find ways to save $$$
• The Well-Architected Review
  • Centered around the question "Are you well architected?"
  • The Well-Architected review provides a consistent approach to review workload against current AWS best practices and gives advice on how to architect for the cloud
  • Benefits of the review
    • Build and deploy faster
    • Lower or mitigate risks
    • Make informed decisions
    • Learn AWS best practices
• The AWS Well-Architected Tool
  • Cloud-based service available from the AWS console
  • Provides consistent process for you to review and measure your architecture using the AWS Well-Architected Framework
  • Helps you:
    • Learn
    • Measure
    • Improve
  • Improvement plan
    • Based on identified high and medium risk topics
    • Canned list of suggested action items to address each risk topic
  • Milestones
    • Makes a read-only snapshot of completed questions and answers
  • Best practices
    • Save milestone after initially completing workload review
    • Then, whenever you make large changes to your workload architecture, perform a subsequent review and save as a new milestone

Links

• AWS Well-Architected
• AWS Well-Architected Framework - Online/HTML version
  • includes drill down pages for each review question, with recommended action items to address that issue
• AWS Well-Architected Tool
• Enhanced Networking
• Amazon EBS-optimized instance
• VPC Endpoint
• Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration
• AWS Billing and Cost Management

Whitepapers

• AWS Well-Architected Framework
• Operational Excellence Pillar
• Security Pillar
• Reliability Pillar
• Performance-Efficiency Pillar
• Cost Optimization Pillar

End Song:
The Shadow Gallery by Roy England

For a full transcription of this episode, please visit the episode webpage.

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