Protagona has partnered with AWS to facilitate the delivery of AWS’ Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) program. The WAFR program involves working with an AWS Partner such as Protagona to perform a comprehensive review of infrastructure and strategy of a workload in AWS. As a result of the review, 45% of identified high-risk items will be remediated and documentation of all high-risk items will be provided as a deliverable. Perhaps the most attractive portion of this offering is that AWS completely funds this program, making it a net $0 investment for clients that partake.
Meet the Well-Architected Pillars
Operational Excellence
Focusing on delivering business outcomes, observability, and overall strategic capability. Dig into your AWS workload and compare it to operational design approaches that are proven and validated by supporting data.
In this pillar we’ll focus on the methods through which your organization can see into the workload, manage the success of the business outcomes derived from the workload and increase the ability of actors to deliver and support the workload.
Reliability
Protagona will pick apart every facet of your AWS workload and align strategies + solutions to areas of reliability weakness. From simple scaling and load balancing, to global active:active scenarios – we cover absolutely all levels from small business to larger enterprise.
In this pillar you can expect us to dissect the failure scenarios for workload components and align custom-tailored solutions that follow AWS’ best practice to defeat downtime.
Cost Optimization
Workloads in AWS can stand to benefit from an enormous economy of scale, as long as you know how.
In this pillar we’ll pick apart the recurring and reserved expenditure of each workload component, and analyze where workloads might benefit from a change in shape, strategy, purchase model or structure.
Additionally, if you’re in a position to be eligible for further AWS funding and programs we’ll even help identify this and submit for funding on your behalf.
Security
Protagona focuses on using best-of-breed security implementation and native tooling within AWS to provide protection and insights at a net operational decrease in effort. Take advantage of AWS tooling, advanced detection and protection methods, as well as a host of AI + ML driven goodies.
In this pillar we’ll work collaboratively with your team to evaluate and test the network, application and operational layers of your workload using AWS best practice methodology.Performance Efficiency
AWS moves incredibly quickly to achieve dozens of service release cycles across its platform in the average day. Performance Efficiency focuses on strategies to best fit AWS’ aggressive development and product cycle to your workload to make AWS’ aggressive approach work for your solutions.
Ideal solutions vary heavily between workloads, but our skilled architects personally handle each WAFR workload to carefully prescribe the correct approaches.
Sustainability
AWS practices what it preaches with leading-edge and industry defining sustainability standards for cloud workloads.
In this pillar we’ll be picking apart all of the ways in which your organization can align sustainability goals with AWS consumption and growth.
Running even the largest of enterprise cloud footprints in a carbon-neutral manner is 100% possible.
Well-Architected Review Steps
1
Kickoff + Scoping
In the beginning, we’ll be collaboratively identify what the workload looks like, discuss pain points and set goals for future state.
Attendees
- Protagona Solutions Architect
- Protagona Account Executive/CSM
- Client team and contacts
Est. Duration
30 Minutes
2
AWS Architecture Review
At this stage, our Solutions Architect will collaboratively work with your project or product team and iterate through the 6 pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework to identify key High Risk Items (HRIs) – as well as dig into potential solutions
Attendees
- Protagona Solutions Architect
- Client team and contacts
Est. Duration
2 – 4 Hours
3
Findings Evaluation
Sit back and absorb as much information as possible – our Solutions Architect has compiled and will present key HRIs that we’ve targeted as potential remediation items to resolve collaboratively.
Attendees
- Protagona Solutions Architect
- Client team and contacts
Est. Duration
45 – 60 Minutes
4
Remediation Session
In this session, our Solutions Architect will work to implement remedies or instruct on how to build resolutions to the selected HRIs. Either have our Solutions Architect drive through the remediations live, or have our Architect instruct your team on the solutions.
Attendees
- Protagona Solutions Architect
- Client team and contacts
Est. Duration
2 Hours
5
Closing + Funding
To close out your Well-Architected Review, we’ll reconvene on the performed remediations, submit for funding on your behalf to AWS and propose other opportunities for funding or future work.
Attendees
- Protagona Solutions Architect
- Protagona Account Executive/CSM
- Client team and contacts
Est. Duration
30 Minutes
Book Today
Book your introductory Well Architected Framework Review session as soon as today! Using the form below, select a date + time that works for you and your team.
Well-Architected Review FAQs
Protagona employs only the highest caliber of Solutions Architect and Cloud Engineering staff, so much so that every employee has an engineering background and is AWS Certified.
Protagona also runs a preferred WAFR program with AWS – So much so, that Protagona is one of the preferred partners to deliver WAFRs because we consistently deliver at such an outstanding quality (our clients words, not ours!).
WAFRs will typically run between 1-2 weeks in duration, with a time investment from the client-side of between 5-7.5 hours spread out over this timeframe.
Yes! We charge USD $5,000 for the Well-Architected Review to be performed, and then AWS provides our clients with USD $5,000 in AWS credits. This works out to be a net zero dollar investment from the client side, but we’ll still invoice you for the program undertaking. So technically there is a cost to the program, but AWS subsidizes it entirely with AWS credits.
AWS credits are essentially a gift card for AWS – they apply to your AWS expenditure and will pay for the running costs of your infrastructure. In short, they can be applied directly to your AWS Bill.
See here for more info directly from AWS on Billing Credits.
Absolutely anyone who holds a stake in the operation, development or maintenance of the workload to be reviewed. This could include developers, infrastructure or engineering members, team leaders, etc. The WAFR sessions are entirely collaborative and we aim to receive a good spectrum of collaborative input from stakeholders so that our Solutions Architects are able to provide the best remediations and deliverable content possible.
Almost every workload that has a production, pre-production or in-development stage with a full or partial footprint in AWS is very likely to be eligible for a WAFR.
Mostly read-only, and no access to data is needed (we make a strong point to respect the OpSec of client workloads).
Protagona will provide you with a CloudFormation template to be executed containing instructions for a Cross-Account IAM role with intent to provide highly secure access with no credentials to maintain. This role will only require access to write to the Well Architected Tool service in AWS, generic ReadOnly access, read access to the Billing service and contains deny statements to datastores and data sources (S3, CloudFormation, DynamoDB, Kinesis, Secrets Manager, etc.)
The WAFR is intended to be a fully cyclical process to implement positive feedback in a loop for your organization. Protagona has partnered with AWS to provide the WAFR as a service that can be fully funded for each workload, every year in an iterative manner.
Our goals are to set the benchmark for resolution of risk, and provide objective review of the organization from an outside perspective each year and help track improvement iteratively as the workload evolves.
AWS’ definition for a workload is as follows “The term workload is used to identify a set of components that together deliver business value. A workload is usually the level of detail that business and technology leaders communicate about.“
This loosely translates to an abstract that we’re free to define as long as it makes sense to do so for practical reasons. We typically define a workload as being a product, subset of collective products, an application or collective set of infrastructure that is logical to group around an organizational team or business unit.
This definition differs fairly heavily between organization types, levels of autonomy between teams and departments in an organization – so we’ll work together in our initial meeting to define what constitutes the workload to be reviewed and set this as our scope.
The absolute best WAFRs are those with a high degree of conversation and collaboration. Teams which are very involved in the Architecture meetings in particular, and provide lots of context to questions posed will typically get the absolute most out of the WAFR process.
Ideally the WAFR should be a deeply technical conversational assessment of AWS infrastructure and strategy, as long as key members show up and partake in that discussion – we’ll always be able to deliver with the highest of quality.
