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Reliability

The Reliability pillar includes the ability of a workload to perform its intended function correctly and consistently, and to recover from failures to meet demand.

Questions

REL01 6 best practices
How do you manage service quotas and constraints?
BP01 Aware of service quotas and constraints BP02 Manage service quotas across accounts and regions BP03 Accommodate fixed service quotas and constraints through architecture BP04 Monitor and manage quotas BP05 Automate quota management BP06 Ensure that a sufficient gap exists between the current quotas and the maximum usage to accommodate failover
REL02 5 best practices
How do you plan your network topology?
BP01 Use highly available network connectivity for your workload public endpoints BP02 Provision redundant connectivity between private networks in the cloud and on-premises environments BP03 Ensure IP subnet allocation accounts for expansion and availability BP04 Prefer hub-and-spoke topologies over many-to-many mesh BP05 Enforce non-overlapping private IP address ranges in all private address spaces where they are connected
REL03 3 best practices
How do you design your workload service architecture?
BP01 Choose how to segment your workload BP02 Build services focused on specific business domains and functionality BP03 Provide service contracts per API
REL04 4 best practices
How do you design interactions in a distributed system to prevent failures?
BP01 Identify the kind of distributed systems you depend on BP02 Implement loosely coupled dependencies BP03 Do constant work BP04 Make mutating operations idempotent
REL05 7 best practices
How do you design interactions in a distributed system to mitigate or withstand failures?
BP01 Implement graceful degradation to transform applicable hard dependencies into soft dependencies BP02 Throttle requests BP03 Control and limit retry calls BP04 Fail fast and limit queues BP05 Set client timeouts BP06 Make systems stateless where possible BP07 Implement emergency levers
REL06 7 best practices
How do you monitor workload resources?
BP01 Monitor all components for the workload (Generation) BP02 Define and calculate metrics (Aggregation) BP03 Send notifications (Real-time processing and alarming) BP04 Automate responses (Real-time processing and alarming) BP05 Create dashboards BP06 Review metrics at regular intervals BP07 Monitor end-to-end tracing of requests through your system
REL07 4 best practices
How do you design your workload to adapt to changes in demand?
BP01 Use auto scaling or on-demand resources BP02 Obtain resources upon detection of impairment to a workload BP03 Obtain resources upon detection that more resources are needed for a workload BP04 Load test your workload
REL08 5 best practices
How do you implement change?
BP01 Use runbooks for standard activities such as deployment BP02 Integrate functional testing as part of your deployment BP03 Integrate resiliency testing as part of your deployment BP04 Deploy using immutable infrastructure BP05 Deploy changes with automation
REL09 4 best practices
How do you back up data?
BP01 Identify and back up all data that needs to be backed up, or reproduce the data from sources BP02 Secure and encrypt backups BP03 Perform data backup automatically BP04 Perform periodic recovery of the data to verify backup integrity and processes
REL10 3 best practices
How do you use fault isolation to protect your workload?
BP01 Deploy the workload to multiple locations BP02 Select the appropriate locations for your multi-location deployment BP03 Automate recovery for components constrained to a single location
REL11 7 best practices
How do you design your workload to withstand component failures?
BP01 Monitor all components of the workload to detect failures BP02 Fail over to healthy resources BP03 Automate healing on all layers BP04 Rely on the data plane and not the control plane during recovery BP05 Use static stability to prevent bimodal behavior BP06 Send notifications when events impact availability BP07 Architect your product to meet availability targets and uptime service level agreements (SLAs)
REL12 5 best practices
How do you test reliability?
BP01 Use playbooks to investigate failures BP02 Perform post-incident analysis BP03 Test functional requirements BP04 Test scaling and performance requirements BP05 Test resiliency using chaos engineering
REL13 5 best practices
How do you plan for disaster recovery?
BP01 Define recovery objectives for downtime and data loss BP02 Use defined recovery strategies to meet the recovery objectives BP03 Test disaster recovery implementation to validate the implementation BP04 Manage configuration drift at the DR site or region BP05 Automate recovery

AWS services for Reliability

Amazon CloudWatch

Monitors your AWS resources and the applications you run on AWS in real time.

AWS Auto Scaling

Monitors your applications and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance.

Amazon RDS

Set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud with high availability.

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery

Minimizes downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery of applications.

AWS Backup

Centrally manages and automates backups across AWS services.

Elastic Load Balancing

Automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets.

Amazon Route 53

Provides highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service.

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