Let’s Architect! Resiliency in architectures

What is “resiliency”, and why does it matter? When we discussed this topic in an early 2022 edition of Let’s Architect!, we referenced the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which defines resilience as having “the capability to recover when stressed by load, accidental or intentional attacks, and failure of any part in the workload’s components.” Businesses rely heavily on the availability and performance of their digital services. Resilience has emerged as critical for any efficiently architected system, which is why it is a fundamental role in ensuring the reliability and availability of workloads hosted on the AWS Cloud platform.

In this newer edition of Let’s Architect!, we share some best practices for putting together resilient architectures, focusing on providing continuous service and avoiding disruptions. Ensuring uninterrupted operations is likely a primary objective when it comes to building a resilient architecture.

Understand resiliency patterns and trade-offs to architect efficiently in the cloud

In this AWS Architecture Blog post, the authors introduce five resilience patterns. Each of these patterns comes with specific strengths and trade-offs, allowing architects to personalize their resilience strategies according to the unique requirements of their applications and business needs. By understanding these patterns and their implications, organizations can design resilient cloud architectures that deliver high availability and efficient recovery from potential disruptions.

Take me to this Architecture Blog post!

Resilience patterns and tradeoffs

Timeouts, retries, and backoff with jitter

Marc Broker discusses the inevitability of failures and the importance of designing systems to withstand them. He highlights three essential tools for building resilience: timeouts, retries, and backoff. By embracing these three techniques, we can create robust systems that maintain high availability in the face of failures. Timeouts, backoff, and jitter are fundamental to spread the traffic coming from clients and avoid overloading your systems. Building resilience is a fundamental aspect of ensuring the reliability and performance of AWS services in the ever-changing and dynamic technological landscape.

Take me to the Amazon Builders’ Library!

The Amazon Builder’s Library is a collection of technical resources produced by engineers at Amazon

Prepare & Protect Your Applications From Disruption With AWS Resilience Hub

The AWS Resilience Hub not only protects businesses from potential downtime risks but also helps them build a robust foundation for their applications, ensuring uninterrupted service delivery to customers and users.

In this AWS Online Tech Talk, led by the Principal Product Manager of AWS Resilience Hub, the importance of a resilience hub to protect mission-critical applications from downtime risks is emphasized. The AWS Resilience Hub is showcased as a centralized platform to define, validate, and track application resilience. The talk includes strategies to avoid disruptions caused by software, infrastructure, or operational issues, plus there’s also a demo demonstrating how to apply these techniques effectively.

If you are interested in delving deeper into the services discussed in the session, AWS Resilience Hub is a valuable resource for monitoring and implementing resilient architectures.

Take me to this AWS Online Tech Talk!

AWS Resilience Hub recommendations

Data resiliency design patterns with AWS

In this re:Invent 2022 session, data resiliency, why it matters to customers, and how you can incorporate it into your application architecture is discussed in depth. This session kicks off with the comprehensive overview of data resiliency, breaking down its core components and illustrating its critical role in modern application development. It, then, covers application data resiliency and protection designs, plus extending from the native data resiliency capabilities of AWS storage through DR solutions using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery.

Take me to this re:Invent 2022 video!

Asynchronous cross-region replication

See you next time!

Thanks for joining our discussion on architecture resiliency! See you in two weeks when we’ll talk about security on AWS.

To find all the blogs from this series, visit the Let’s Architect! list of content on the AWS Architecture Blog.