AWS Well-Architected Lenses

As of April 2022, AWS has launched 13 Well-Architected Lenses addressing architecting needs specific to technology workloads and industry domains. The following are the important available lenses for AWS’s Well-Architected Framework:

• Serverless Applications Lens – Building a serverless workload saves costs and offloads infrastructure maintenance to the cloud. The Serverless Applications Lens provides details on best practices to architect serverless application workloads in the AWS cloud. More information on the design principles is available on the AWS website: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/serverless-applications-lens.
• Internet of Things (IoT) Lens – To design an IoT workload, you must know how to manage and secure it on millions of devices that need to connect over the internet. The IoT Lens provides details on designing an IoT workload. More details on design principles are available on the AWS website: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/iot-lens.
• Data Analytics Lens – Data is the new gold. Every organization is trying to put its data to the best use to get insights for its customers and improve its business. The Data Analytics Lens provides best practices for building a data pipeline. More details on the design principles are available on the AWS website: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/analytics-lens.
• Machine Learning (ML) Lens – ML applies to almost any workload, especially getting future insights from historical data. With the ever-increasing adoption of ML workloads, it is essential to have the ability to put an ML model into production and use it at scale. The ML Lens provides best practices for training, tuning, and deploying your ML model. More details on the design principles are available on the AWS website: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/machine-learning-lens.
• Hybrid Networking Lens – Networking is the backbone of any application workload, whether on-premises or in the cloud. As enterprises are adopting the cloud, the need for a hybrid cloud setup is increasing every day, to establish communication between on-premises and cloud workloads. The AWS Hybrid Networking Lens introduces best practices for designing networks for the hybrid cloud. More details on the design principles are available on the AWS website: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/hybrid-networking-lens.

Above, we have covered some of the important lenses, but I encourage you to explore other industry-focused Well-Architected Lenses such as gaming, streaming media, finance, and workload-specific lenses, including SAP, SaaS, HPC (High-Performance Computing), and FTR (Functional Technical Review) to validate your cloud platforms. You can apply various lenses when defining your workload in AWS’s Well-Architected tool, as shown below:

Figure 2.8: AWS Well-Architected Lenses

After applying a lens to your workload, you will get a best practice checklist specific to the domain; for example, the screenshot below shows a Well-Architected checklist for the Serverless Lens:

Figure 2.9: AWS Well-Architected Serverless Lens

As shown in the preceding screenshot, much like AWS’s WAR tool where you saw six pillars in the previous section, each lens has questions related to 5 key pillars to validate workloads and identify HRIs. 

AWS users must constantly evaluate their systems to ensure that they follow the recommended principles of the AWS Well-Architected Framework and AWS Well-Architected Lenses and that they comply with and follow architecture best practices. As you must be getting more curious about AWS by now, let’s learn how to build your knowledge of the AWS cloud and establish yourself as a subject matter expert.