Improve the performance of your digital cloud infrastructure, boosting its security, reliability, and operational excellence. At Itera we have experience and success stories that support us in organizations from different industries in Latin America. By combining our knowledge and commitment with advanced Amazon Web Services (AWS) technology, we take the efficiency of your cloud infrastructure to the next level.
With 22 years of experience, a global Platinum level – in which only five companies associated with AWS are located – and recognized as the best Well-Architected partner 2022, we are the perfect ally to bring organizations’ digital infrastructures to an optimal state from different angles of the business.
Some of the main challenges we face when supporting organizations by performing a Well-Architected Framework on their workloads are:
Lack of awareness: Some organizations may not be familiar with the Well-Architected Framework or may not fully understand its importance. It can be challenging to properly socialize the benefits of following architectural best practices and how this can improve the efficiency and security of your cloud systems.
Perception of cost: Some organizations might perceive reviewing and monitoring the Well-Architected Framework as an unnecessary additional expense. Importantly, the proper implementation of best practices can lead to long-term savings by optimizing the use of resources and reducing operational costs.
Resistance to change: If organizations already have systems in place, they might resist making significant changes to the existing architecture. It can be challenging to raise awareness of the importance of making adjustments to improve efficiency, security, and scalability.
Lack of resources (staffing): Some organizations might argue that they do not have the resources to spend time with staff assigned to evaluating and adjusting their architecture. It is important when we highlight that the investment of time in the review and adjustment can lead to long-term benefits in terms of reliability and performance.
Comfort with the current state: Organizations might be comfortable with how they currently operate, even if there are areas where improvements could be made. Guiding our customers that it is possible to improve performance and safety can be a total challenge.
Lack of urgency: If systems are running smoothly, organizations may not feel an immediate urgency to make changes. In this case, it is important to highlight that prevention and long-term planning are essential to avoid future problems.
Technical complexity: Some organizations may feel that implementing the recommendations of the Well-Architected Framework is technically complex. It is crucial when we provide them with assistance and guidance in the implementation so that they feel supported in this process.
The cost of expert advice: Believing that, as a technology and consulting services company, a charge is generated for these services without knowing that this charge becomes an investment between AWS and us as a Partner, is one of the challenges. On the contrary, it is important for organizations to feel more confident in receiving from Itera experience and specialized knowledge in the successful implementation of the Well-Architected Framework. Customers come to rely on our guidance and expert support to ensure best practices are followed effectively.
Continuous innovation: The fear of change in the face of adopting the framework is not only about adhering to predefined guidelines, but also about fostering a culture of continuous improvement in the cloud. Customers can be motivated by the opportunity to constantly innovate and optimize their solutions.
Architecture optimization: Organizations don’t identify value in optimizing their cloud architectures. Implementing the framework helps them identify areas for improvement and design more efficient and resilient solutions.
Cultural change: Adopting the Well-Architected Framework could require a cultural shift within the organization, especially if it involves greater collaboration between teams or the adoption of new practices and tools.
To address these challenges, it is important when we as a specialist Partner clearly communicate the benefits of following architectural best practices, providing examples of how these practices have been successful in other projects and offering technical and educational support to facilitate the implementation of the framework, as some organisations do not have:
Organizations that operate in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud have multiple applications and workloads in their environment as well as different problems specific to each organization, but when they decide to use the Well-Architected Framework, we manage to describe the implementation of the principles and best practices of the Well-Architected in a business environment that seeks to optimize cloud infrastructure.
Our goal at Itera as a specialized partner is to ensure that applications are secure, efficient, reliable, and high-performance, using the framework’s recommendations, where we can ensure that your architectures comply with best practices and maximize efficiency, security, performance, and reliability. In this sense, the experience of end users has been improved by relying on the availability, reliability, scalability, agility and innovation that they can achieve through this program.
By initiating this process, the needs are identified and prioritized according to the services of each of our customers and by implementing the six pillars of the Well-Architected Framework, AWS services are maintained securely, efficiently, and reliably.
Organizations experience a noticeable and significant improvement in operational agility, data security, application reliability, cost optimization, and overall application performance. This allows organizations to deliver high-quality service while maximizing the benefits of cloud infrastructure.
Additionally, we as a Partner have a native process of the organization created exclusively for the execution of the Well-Architected Framework, where it allows us to have workspaces with our clients to review pillar by pillar with them and in this way discover together the possible opportunities for improvement.
At the end of this review stage, we generate a collaborative work meeting between the parties to prioritize and discuss what was detected and identified, thus reaching the next stage of remediation, where we address in detail each aspect prioritized and agreed upon together with our client.
As a next stage, we close our execution by presenting reports and results to the client, involving the interested areas to suggest complementary improvements that in turn become new opportunities for us as a Partner and for AWS.
Taking into account the above, when executing the Well-Architected Framework, the following milestones are solved:
Efficiency: Our customers on average have 20% of EC2 and RDS instances oversized, wasting resources.
Security: There is a 15% lack of compliance in terms of security (based on Security Hub results) in access to resources. At the security level, several layers are implemented using AWS services such as AWS GuardDuty that facilitates real-time analysis of suspicious behavior, AWS WAF to protect public consumption of services at layer 7, and Cognito to secure access to applications.
Performance: there is evidence of approximately 30% degradation of the performance of the workloads at peak hours of the organizations.
Reliability: Non-fault-resilient deployments have caused 10% unplanned downtime.
Some of the solutions to the situations presented above are:
Efficiency: 15% to 30% reduction by optimizing the architecture in terms of number of components and idle resources, response times will also improve significantly in internal and external applications, leading to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Security: approximately 20% improvement in regulatory compliance and data protection, adding improvement of security layers on the consumption of public and private resources. These results are based on the security frameworks covered by Security Hub.
Performance: 25% increase in ability to handle peak loads.
Reliability:
Scalability:
Costs: based on this experience, it is planned to refactor 30% of the services currently executed, with the aim of having native solutions of the AWS cloud and being able to generate automated processes in accordance with best practices.
Amazon EC2: To deploy appropriately sized and distributed VMs.
Amazon RDS: For highly available and resilient databases, as well as being self-managed.
Amazon S3: Scalable and secure storage for data and files, based on objects.
Amazon CloudWatch: Monitoring and alerting for application health and performance.
Amazon Auto Scaling: Automatic capacity adjustment based on demand.
Amazon ELB (Elastic load Balancer): Distributing traffic to instances across multiple Availability Zones.
AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management): Secure access control to resources.
AWS CloudFormation: Deploy and manage infrastructure as code.
Amazon VPC: To isolate and secure cloud resources from networks.
Amazon CloudFront: For fast and secure content delivery.
AWS Trusted Advisor: To provide automated recommendations on cost, performance, security, and availability optimization.
Amazon API Gateway: To expose and consume AWS-hosted services using APIs.
Amazon Certificate Manager: To manage SSL certificates.
Amazon Cognito: To centralize user and application authentication.
Amazon DocumentDB – A database engine based on MongoDB.
Amazon Elastic Container Registry: being the AWS repository for Docker images.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service: AWS Kubernetes service.
Amazon Internet gateway: AWS Internet service.
Amazon Key Management Service: Encrypted key control for storage on AWS.
Amazon Lambda: Serverless service for executing code functions and events.
Amazon NAT gateways: Consumption control of private tier internet services.
Amazon RDS Aurora MySQL: Native AWS database based on MySQL.
Amazon RDS SQL Server: Self-managed SQL Server database.
Amazon Route 53 – Domain Manager.
Amazon Secrets Manager: Password and key manager.
Amazon Transit gateways: Centralized network management on AWS.
Amazon Virtual private network: AWS IPSec VPN service.
Amazon WAF: Layer 7 security control for applications.
Amazon CloudTrail: Log logging and control on AWS.
Amazon Config: Configuring and enforcing resources on AWS.
By implementing the Well-Architected Framework, organizations are able to optimize their workloads in terms of efficiency, security, performance, and reliability. This results in reduced costs, better data protection, greater ability to handle varying loads, and a significant decrease in unplanned downtime. The AWS components and services used enable these goals to be achieved effectively.
Your organization’s digital infrastructure can experience a noticeable and significant improvement in operational agility, data security, cost optimization, as well as the overall reliability and performance of your applications.
As an AWS Platinum Partner and through the proper implementation of the Well-Architected Framework, at Itera we offer you a high-quality service that maximizes the benefits of your cloud infrastructure.
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