General Design Principles

This content is outdated. This version of the Well-Architected Framework is now found at: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/en_us/wellarchitected/2022-03-31/framework/general-design-principles.html

The Well-Architected Framework identifies a set of general design principles to facilitate good design in the cloud:

Stop guessing your capacity needs: If you make a poor capacity decision when deploying a workload, you might end up sitting on expensive idle resources or dealing with the performance implications of limited capacity. With cloud computing, these problems can go away. You can use as much or as little capacity as you need, and scale up and down automatically.
Test systems at production scale: In the cloud, you can create a production-scale test environment on demand, complete your testing, and then decommission the resources. Because you only pay for the test environment when it's running, you can simulate your live environment for a fraction of the cost of testing on premises.
Automate to make architectural experimentation easier: Automation allows you to create and replicate your workloads at low cost and avoid the expense of manual effort. You can track changes to your automation, audit the impact, and revert to previous parameters when necessary.
Allow for evolutionary architectures: Allow for evolutionary architectures. In a traditional environment, architectural decisions are often implemented as static, one-time events, with a few major versions of a system during its lifetime. As a business and its context continue to evolve, these initial decisions might hinder the system's ability to deliver changing business requirements. In the cloud, the capability to automate and test on demand lowers the risk of impact from design changes. This allows systems to evolve over time so that businesses can take advantage of innovations as a standard practice.
Drive architectures using data: In the cloud, you can collect data on how your architectural choices affect the behavior of your workload. This lets you make fact-based decisions on how to improve your workload. Your cloud infrastructure is code, so you can use that data to inform your architecture choices and improvements over time.
Improve through game days: Test how your architecture and processes perform by regularly scheduling game days to simulate events in production. This will help you understand where improvements can be made and can help develop organizational experience in dealing with events.