Using Well Architect Framework to Address Technical Debt - Part 1

 Since getting my well-architected framework proficiency certification a year back, I have become a massive fan of the framework and have used it extensively at work. The Well Architected Framework is a tool with a set of standards and questionnaires that illustrates design patterns, key concepts, design principles, and best practices for designing, architecting, and running workloads in the cloud.

All major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, Google, and Oracle have defined the framework foundation, and they continue to evolve them with their platforms and services. 

Organizations that have moved to the cloud have a different set of challenges. As all workloads are running in the cloud, the typical requirement from businesses is for more agility and focus on shipping functionalities to production. Teams are very less invested in improving the technical debts. This leads to more reactive rather than proactively continuous improvements and a huge pile load of epics to resolve.

The well-architected framework (WAF) suits really well for teams that are unaware of where to start with the technical debt in terms of priority. The fundamental pillars of the WAF are  

a) System design b) Operational Excellence c) Security d) Reliability e) Performance f) Cost optimization and the newly added pillar g) Sustainability.

The framework can be fine-tuned to fit custom requirements based on the application domain. The framework is also apt to address typical Cloud challenges like the high cost of cloud subscriptions, Application Performance tuning, Cloud security, Operation Challenges in a Cloud or Hybrid setup, Quick recoveries from failure, and improvement on organizations' Green Index.

A dashboard helps to view the technical debts once the questionnaire is updated based on the WAF pillars. The below diagram illustrates the WAF dashboard heatmap and the technical debt based on prioritization and impact. The dashboard stresses the needed improvement and helps to measure the changes implemented by comparing them to all the possible best practices. 

 Performing these reviews on a timely basis helps the team to identify unknown risks and mitigate the problem very early. The WAF reviews fit well with the Agile ways of working and the principle of Continuous improvement. 

Below are the links to Well-Architected Frameworks described by different cloud vendors.

a) https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected 

b) https://cloud.google.com/architecture/framework 

c) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/framework/ 

d) https://docs.oracle.com/en/solutions/oci-best-practices