Service pillars overview
At first glance, you may be wondering why we aren't just jumping right into AWS, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), and other DevOps topics. The main reason is that these five pillars are the foundational fabric of the exams. In addition, they will help you provide the most effective, dependable, and efficient environment for your company or clients. These design principles are not only important when architecting for success on Amazon Web Services, or any cloud provider for that matter, but in guiding the practices that you use throughout your day-to-day endeavors.
Once you become familiar with these pillars, you will see them and their themes in the testing questions as you go down your path for certification. This is especially true when working to obtain the DevOps Professional Certification as there are specific sections for Operations, Security, and Reliability.
The following are the five pillars of a well-architected framework:
- Operational excellence
- Security
- Reliability
- Performance efficiency
- Cost optimization
Use these pillars as the guiding principles, not only for designing your workloads in AWS but also for improving and refactoring current workloads. Every organization should strive to achieve well-architected applications and systems. Therefore, improving any AWS applications you are working on will make you a valuable asset. Now, let's look at each of these pillars in detail.