Applying the Framework: A Practical Review

In this lesson, we bring together everything you have learned about the AWS Well-Architected Framework by walking through a practical review of a fictional e-commerce application. You will see how to assess each pillar, identify risks, and build an improvement plan.

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The Scenario

ShopFast is a growing e-commerce company that has migrated its platform to AWS. The architecture currently looks like this:

• Frontend: React application hosted on a single EC2 instance running Nginx
• API: Node.js REST API on two EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer
• Database: Single RDS MySQL instance (no Multi-AZ, no read replicas)
• Storage: Product images stored in S3
• Authentication: Custom auth module with passwords stored in the application database
• Deployments: Manual deployments via SSH from a developer's laptop
• Monitoring: Basic CloudWatch CPU alarms on EC2 instances
• Networking: All resources in a single VPC, single Availability Zone
• IAM: One shared IAM user with administrator access used by all developers
• Backups: RDS automated backups enabled with 7-day retention; no tested restore process

Let's review this architecture against each pillar.

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Pillar 1: Operational Excellence

Current State Assessment