Let’s Architect! Tools for Cloud Architects

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A great way for cloud architects to learn is to experiment with the tools that our teams are using or could consider for the future. This allows us to learn new technologies, become familiar with the latest trends, and understand the entire cycle of our solutions.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides several tools for architects, including resources that can analyze your environment for creating a visual diagram and a community of builders who can answer your technical questions.

Today we’re excited to share  tools and methodologies that you should be aware of. In honor of the Architecture Blog’s International Women’s Day, half of these tools have been developed with and by women.

AWS Perspective

One of the main challenges for every architect is making sure their documentation is up to date. Recently, we’ve seen the rise of “architecture as code” tools for deriving architecture diagrams directly from the code in production.

In that vein, AWS developed AWS Perspective, a diagramming tool solution that helps you represent your live workload.

Chaos Testing with AWS Fault Injection Simulator and AWS CodePipeline

Chaos engineering is the process of testing a distributed computing system to ensure that it can withstand unexpected disruptions.

This blog post shows an architecture pattern for automating chaos testing as part of your continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) process. By automating the implementation of chaos experiments inside CI/CD pipelines, complex risks and modeled failure scenarios can be tested against application environments with every deployment

AWS re:Post – A Reimagined Q&A Experience for the AWS Community

Often when architecting we run into different design choices, issues, and roadblocks. What service should you use? What is the best way to implement this? Who do you ask?

AWS re:Post is a new question-and-answer service (think Stack Overflow specifically for AWS). It is monitored by the community who answers your questions, and then employees and official partners review these answers to ensure accuracy.

Establishing Feedback Loops Based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework Review

In 2018, AWS released the Well-Architected Framework, a mechanism for reviewing and/or improving your workloads that provides recommendations based on best practices in different areas such as security, costs optimization, or reliability. This article shows you how to improve iteratively your systems in the cloud using the Well-Architected Framework.

See you next time!

Thanks for reading! If you’re looking for more ways tools to architect your workload, check out the AWS Architecture Center.

See you in a couple of weeks when we discuss blockchain!

Other posts in this series

• Let’s Architect! Architecting for Sustainability
• Let’s Architect! Architecting for Machine Learning
• Let’s Architect! Architecting for Security

We’ve got more content for International Women’s Day!

For more than a week we’ll share content created by women. Check it out!

• Celebrate International Women’s Day all week with the Architecture Blog
• A collection of several blog posts written and co-authored by women
• A post on Women at AWS – Diverse Backgrounds, Common Goal of Becoming Solutions Architects
• Another post on Building your brand as a SA

Other ways to participate

• Share Your 2022 #SheCoded Story
• International Women’s Day: Improve Equality for Women in Tech
• AWS She Builds CloudUp program