Introducing the latest AWS Well-Architected Framework: IoT Lens

AWS is pleased to introduce an update to the AWS Well-Architected Framework: IoT Lens. The IoT Lens provides simple and detailed guidance to build IoT workloads on AWS. This updated version aims to address questions around complexity, security, performance, cost, and technical risk.

Introduction

Designing Internet of Things (IoT) workloads can be challenging as sensors, devices, software applications, agents, and cloud services must be designed to optimize how they work together. It’s also important to balance the trade-offs to support your solution’s business context.

Questions you might consider:

• How does will it work in practice?
• Which guiding principles should I follow?
• Which areas are the most important?
• Where do I start?
• How do I balance cost, security, resilience, performance, and innovation?

Since 2015, the AWS Well-Architected Framework (WAF) has helped AWS customers and partners improve their cloud architectures and reduce technical risk. The WAF consists of questions, best practices, and implementation guidance to reduce risk across the six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. These are not a rigid set of rules. Instead, they’re a set of guiding principles with prescriptive implementation guidance. The IoT Lens extends the WAF for IoT workloads.

The WAF helps you understand the pros and cons of the design decisions you make when building workloads on AWS. Using this methodology, you can learn architectural best practices to design and operate reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective applications in the cloud. The WAF provides a way for you to consistently measure your architecture against industry best practices and identify areas for improvement. We believe that a well-architected system greatly increases the likelihood of achieving your business goals.

The IoT Lens, first released in 2019, covers common IoT implementation scenarios. It also identifies key workload elements that can guide your architectural choices for your IoT device, edge, and cloud-based workloads. These elements follow AWS best practices that have been aggregated from our experience across thousands of customer implementations.

What’s new in the IoT Lens?

• Improved best practices and implementation guidance for all pillars – Your AWS Well-Architected journey just got stronger. We transformed our security pillar from eight to fifteen best practices that guide you with comprehensive coverage for identity, access management, vulnerability management, and compliance. The operational excellence pillar now delivers ten powerful best practices, which is increased from its original six. There are also new recommendations to help improve the performance efficiency and cost optimization pillars. Every best practice includes actionable guidance and target your business-critical workloads. Plus, our new risk ratings help you to tackle implementations strategically.
• Updated scenarios – We added two new scenarios for IoT edge computing and generative AI with IoT.
• Guidance for new features – We expanded several best practices related to new AWS IoT product services and features to improve your cloud workload development. Some examples of the new features include MQTT5, improved edge device security, and sending commands to devices.
• Revised risk ratings – We updated each best practice with risk ratings to help you prioritize your implementation work.
• Updated architectures and technical artifacts – We provided many new documents, blog posts, and instructional and video links to reflect a host of new products, features, and current industry best practices.
• Sustainability pillar – We included the sustainability pillar into the IoT Lens, which is a set of five actionable best practices, prescriptive implementation guidance, and risk ratings.
• Consolidated IoT Lens Checklist and IoT Lens – We added the IoT Lens Checklist into the IoT Lens and retired the standalone IoT Lens Checklist.
• Updated IoT Lens tool – to support Well-Architected Reviews can be found in the Custom Lens repository.
• Well-Architected IAC Analyzer – We designed this tool to automatically assess Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates, such as Amazon CloudFormation and Terraform, against the WAF. It analyzes IaC files to identify potential risks, misconfigurations, and best practices across the WAF pillars. With the IAC Analyzer, you can proactively detect and remediate issues before deploying your solution. This will help to improve workload quality, compliance, and AWS architectural best practice alignment. The tool supports the IoT Lens and is extensible to help you customize and expand to suit your organizational requirements.

Conclusion

The newly released Well-Architected IoT Lens white paper will help you transform your IoT workloads. This powerful resource brings WAF principles directly to your IoT projects, and the Well-Architected IAC Analyzer tool helps to evaluate your IaC templates. By implementing the recommendations in the AWS Well-Architected IoT Lens, you can improve your architecture’s stability and efficiency. You can also receive targeted recommendations to strengthen any weak points.

The IoT Lens evolves alongside the rapidly advancing AWS ecosystem. As new AWS services emerge and fresh pillars (like sustainability) are defined, the Lens grows with them. Our unwavering focus remains clear: empower you to build dependable IoT applications while keeping your attention where it belongs – on your business innovations.

About the authors

Ryan Dsouza is a Principal Solutions Architect in the AWS Cloud Optimization Success organization. Based in New York City, Ryan helps customers design, develop, and operate secure, scalable, and innovative solutions. He uses the breadth and depth of AWS capabilities to deliver measurable business outcomes. He is actively engaged in developing strategies, guidance, and tools to support customer architecture solutions that optimize the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework and Well-Architected Framework.

Madhavan Menon is a Senior Partner Solutions Architect at AWS. He works with AWS partners and helps them deliver cloud and digital transformation outcomes to customers.

Additional authors and contributors

Behind this guidance and tool stands a remarkable collaboration of minds from AWS Solution Architecture, AWS Professional Services, and AWS Cloud Optimization Success team. Their diverse expertise and real-world experience have shaped the AWS Well-Architected IoT Lens into the comprehensive resource it is today.

• David Malone, WW IoT Tech Leader
• Andre Sa, Senior Solutions Architect
• Chris Simpson, Senior Solutions Architect
• Jordan Alexander, Partner Solutions Architect
• Sunitha Eswaraiah, Senior Solutions Architect
• Tim Hahn, Senior Security Consultant