Creating a software system is a lot like constructing a building. If the foundation is not solid, structural problems can undermine the integrity and function of the building.

When building technology solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS), if you neglect the six pillars of operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability, it can become challenging to build a system that delivers on your expectations and requirements.

Incorporating these pillars into your architecture helps produce stable and efficient systems. This allows you to focus on the other aspects of design, such as functional requirements.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps cloud architects build the most secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure possible for their applications. The framework provides a consistent approach for customers and AWS Partners to evaluate architectures, and provides guidance to implement designs that scale with your application needs over time.

Let’s talk about some of the fundamental software design principles, which are typically applied behind the scenes by designers.

Software architecture represents the result of a sequence of design decisions which take place over time as long as software system complexity increases.

For the sake of clarity, let’s define an architecture as a collection of components combined together via connectors, which represent constraints on how components interact.