What a cloud review reveals about how a company actually runs
Becoming an AWS Well-Architected Partner is a series of steps to prove your competency in delivering Well-Architected Reviews to clients. But before you are…
The Full Story
Becoming an AWS Well-Architected Partner is a series of steps to prove your competency in delivering Well-Architected Reviews to clients. But before you are approved to run the review, you reach a step where you are required to run one on your own business. We went into ours expecting a box-ticking exercise and came out with a fresh set of questions about how we operate that we had not considered asking ourselves.
The answers came down to who sat in the room. We could have handed the review to the engineers and waited for the report. Instead, we brought in exco, operations, delivery, sales, support and our solution designers. The questions changed character the moment people outside the technical team started answering them, because the same question means something different to the person selling the work, the person delivering it and the person supporting it 18 months later.
For anyone who has not come across it, the Well-Architected Review is a set of questions AWS publishes at no cost. Answer them against a system that matters to you and you get back a ranked list of risks with a plan attached. It covers six areas: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimisation and sustainability. Most organisations run it once, against one application, and file the report.
That leaves most of the value on the table.
Read the six pillars with your organisation in mind rather than a single piece of software and they hold up well. Operational excellence, on paper, asks whether a system is documented and observable. Applied to a company, it asks whether the way you work exists anywhere outside the heads of the people doing it. Security, in most conversations, means the perimeter. The pillar pushes further: who has access, who granted it, and when was it last reviewed. Reliability reads as a server question. Asked of a business, it becomes a question about concentration — which small group of people carry knowledge nobody else holds.
The review gave us the most to work with in operational excellence. It pointed to a strong operational practice and a thinner paper trail than that practice deserved. A good deal of how we run sat in experience rather than in writing, which is efficient at one size and limiting at the next. Fast-growing companies across the Middle East and Africa meet that same point, usually when hiring starts outpacing the transfer of knowledge.
The second theme was internal communication. We were building capability quicker than we were telling our own people about it. Useful things existed and were underused, because we had not yet built the rhythm of showing the wider business what was available and how to get at it. Easy to fix once visible, and almost invisible while you are busy.
Cost optimisation is the pillar business leaders should read first. It does not ask whether your cloud bill is too high. It asks how you arrived at the number.
In most organisations, next year’s technology budget i…