Designing highly resilient architectures in AWS

What is resilience?

Important concepts to understand resilience and the responsibility model.

Well Architected: Resiliency and the components of reliability

Resiliency is the ability of a workload to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions.

Whitepaper: Shared responsibility model

Resiliency is a shared responsibility between AWS and you, the customer. It is important that you understand how disaster recovery and availability operate under this shared model.

Article: Four things everyone should know about resilience

Dive into these essential concepts for building resilient applications in the cloud on AWS.

Disaster Recovery (DR) vs High Availability (HA)

What is the difference between Disaster Recovery (DR) and High Availability (HA)?

Well Architected: Disaster Recovery (DR) Objectives - Reliability Pillar

Your resiliency strategy should also include Disaster Recovery (DR) objectives based on strategies to recover your workload in case of a disaster event.

Whitepaper: Disaster Recovery of Workloads on AWS: Recovery in the Cloud

Disaster recovery is the process of preparing for and recovering from a disaster.

Whitepaper: Disaster Recovery of On-Premises Applications to AWS

How to implement an AWS disaster recovery solution, including grouping the application into waves, performing drills, and maintaining the solution.

Well Architected: Availability - Reliability Pillar

Availability is the percentage of time that a workload is available for use.

Blog: Understand RPO and RTO

Establishing the correct recovery objective targets at an application level is a critical part of business continuity planning.

Guide: What’s the Difference Between SLAs, SLOs and SLIs?

Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are essential components of service reliability management.

AWS Service Level Agreements (SLA)

AWS commits to offer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and publish Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for all paid, generally available services

Multi-AZ vs Multi-Region

Designing an application across multiple Availability Zones (AZ) or regions

Whitepaper: Advanced Multi AZ Resilience patterns

Many customers run their workloads in highly available, multi-Availability Zone (AZ) configurations.

Blog: Building highly resilient applications using Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller

Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (Route 53 ARC) service allows you to centrally coordinate failovers and recovery readiness of your application.

Workshop: Multi-AZ Resilience patterns

This workshop will demonstrate 1/how you can use services like Amazon CloudWatch to detect gray failures and 2/the use of two mitigation patterns to respond to them.

Whitepaper: AWS Multi-Region Fundamentals

This 300-level paper outlines common multi-Region use cases, shares fundamental multi-Region concepts and implications around design, development, and deployment, and provides prescriptive guidance.

Whitepaper: AWS Fault Isolation Boundaries

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides different isolation boundaries, such as Availability Zones (AZ), Regions, control planes, and data planes

Control plane and data plane

Learn about the control plane and data plane concepts

Article: Avoiding overload in distributed systems by putting the smaller service in control

Roles of a control plane and data plane

Video: AWS re:Invent 2018: Close Loops & Opening Minds: How to Take Control of Systems, Big & Small

Come hear about the techniques we use to build stable and scalable control planes at Amazon.

Video: AWS re:Invent 2019: Beyond five 9s: Lessons from our highest available data planes

Come hear lessons from how AWS has built and architected Amazon Route 53 and the AWS authentication system, designed to survive cataclysmic failures, enormous load increases, and more.

Architecture for Compartmentalization

What is compartmentalization and do you need it?

Blog: AWS and compartmentalization

Amazon Web Services includes some features and offerings that enable effective compartmentalization

Blog: Compute Abstractions on AWS: A Visual Story

The blog goes through the different level of abstraction in Compute.

Article: Static stability using availability zones

The article illustrates the property of static stability and patterns to leverage patterns that we use in AWS to design systems for high availability by leveraging static stability

Article: Shuffle sharing

The article explains what is shuffle sharding.

Solution guidance: Cellular architecture

This Guidance helps customers understand the concepts of implementing a cell-based architecture.

Observability

Detection is key in ensuring your applications are resilient, but is only effective if you're monitoring the right metrics, logs, and traces — key data points in observability.

Workshop: Introduction to AWS Observability

AWS provides native monitoring, logging, alarming, and dashboards with Amazon CloudWatch and tracing through AWS X-Ray.

Documentation: Using synthetic monitoring

You can use Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics to create canaries, configurable scripts that run on a schedule, to monitor your endpoints and APIs.

Workshop: AWS Well-Architected Reliability Workshop

This workshop contains hands-on-labs to help you learn, measure, and improve the reliability of your architecture using best practices from the Reliability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework

Solutions: Observability & Detection

Utilizing instrumentation to understand data associated with the customer experience, scope of the impact, and the operational health is imperative to support failure detection.

Chaos Engineering

Continuous testing is imperative in understanding how your system will react to unknowns.

Blog: Chaos Testing with AWS Fault Injection Simulator and AWS CodePipeline

This blog shows an architecture pattern for automating chaos testing as part of your continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) process.

Video: Back to Basics: Chaos Engineering with AWS Fault Injection Simulator

In this episode, join Krupanidhi as he explores how you can run Chaos Engineering experiments easily using AWS Fault Injection Simulator.

Workshop: Chaos Engineering on AWS

This workshop provides an introduction to chaos engineering using Amazon Web Services (AWS) tooling, with a focus on AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS).

Solutions

AWS Services available to help you build resilient applications.

Introduction to AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (commonly referred to as DRS) minimizes downtime and data loss by providing fast, reliable recovery of physical, virtual, and cloud-based servers into the AWS Cloud.

Solutions: Solutions for Resilience

Browse curated solutions for common use cases for resilience.