Well-Architected Framework (WAF) Introduction

The resilience pillar leverages Huawei's expertise in resilience design and industry best practices to help enterprises build highly available, resilient application systems on Huawei Cloud. A highly resilient system can maintain acceptable service levels even in abnormal scenarios. Additionally, by standardizing change management, deployment, and emergency recovery processes, enterprises can reduce service disruptions and enhance availability.

The security pillar is dedicated to ensuring the security, trustworthiness, and compliance of services. It protects workloads against security threats and reduces security risks through a series of best practices in Huawei Cloud architecture. The security pillar provides best practices to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of systems, assets, and data on the cloud. It ensures legal and compliant use of data, and protects user privacy.

The performance efficiency pillar focuses on how to design a high-performance architecture. Performance is crucial as a fundamental quality attribute, and its failures can lead to serious outcomes. This pillar provides technical methods for designing and improving system performance. It supports software performance engineering and helps optimize system efficiency.

The cost optimization pillar helps enterprises use cloud services effectively for building workloads, improve workload performance throughout the whole lifecycle, cut unnecessary costs, boost operations efficiency, and maximize the cost-effectiveness of cloud applications. This pillar provides systematic practice suggestions summarized from Huawei's cloud cost operations expertise and industry best practices.

The operational excellence pillar uses proven methods to create, run, and improve software effectively while ensuring great customer experiences. It covers team organization, workload design, scaling operations, and ongoing enhancements.

The cloud platform integrates virtualization, database, middleware, big data, and AI technologies with industry best practices to provide hosted cloud services for enterprises. After enterprises migrate services to the cloud, they are no longer limited by their own technical capabilities and can use advanced IT technologies. They can build a modern architecture governance system based on advanced cloud platforms and WA methodologies, enabling organizations, processes, tools, and products to stay ahead in the digital era.

The cloud architecture governance system is different from the traditional IT architecture governance system. It uses the modern cloud platform and lightweight governance system to enhance security, improve resilience, optimize resource utilization, reduce costs, and drive agile innovation.

The cloud platform encapsulates underlying software technologies, allowing enterprises to focus more on service application design. The cloud architecture design encourages the use of domain-driven design (DDD) as the starting point for architecture designs. It integrates resilience, security, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and operational excellence into the architecture design process.

As business requirements and technology development change, the system architecture also needs to evolve and optimize. Architects assess workload architectures against WAF best practices to confirm they meet current cloud requirements and standards. Architecture review is a continuous process. Architects are advised to review the architecture at key milestones or regularly (for example, every six months).

Cloud application development has high maturity in terms of technology, tools, and engineering practices. After migrating services to the cloud, enterprises should upgrade the tool chain, reconstruct the R&D process, and improve the team's cloud R&D capabilities based on cloud best practices. Introducing the advanced DevSecOps system and deterministic O&M system will greatly improve the productivity of enterprises and truly achieve service agility. Based on Huawei's 20 years of digital practice and service experience with millions of enterprise customers, Huawei Cloud draws the essence of the DevSecOps concept in the industry, extracts typical features of the DevSecOps quality and efficiency management system, and explores an effective quality and efficiency methodology and best practices with value creation as the core.

Huawei summarizes and refines a series of systematic design principles and best practices based on its internal resilience design experience and industry best practices to:

• Help customers in leveraging Huawei Cloud's infrastructure to design high availability applications with DR capabilities for various failure scenarios.
• Reduce service interruption duration and improve availability by standardizing change, deployment, and emergency recovery processes.

Cloud security has become a multi-dimensional global challenge. Huawei Cloud WAF combines the advanced cloud security concepts and accumulated network security experience and advantages in the industry, and explores a set of effective cloud security strategies and practices based on the excellent security practices of world-leading Cloud Service Platforms (CSPs). As a result, Huawei Cloud has built a multi-layered security architecture that provides in-depth defense and complies with all relevant regulations. Moreover, Huawei Cloud builds security into and continues to improve the security of its most commonly used Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud services.

The IT O&M industry is changing like never before. We are shifting from reactive O&M for stable devices to proactive O&M for agile services. Instead of focusing on the internal network, we are focusing on customer applications. Instead of focusing on system maintenance engineers, we are focusing more on R&D engineers. Such shifts create a lot of new challenges for O&M, but also create valuable opportunities for the development of organizations and individuals. Huawei Cloud Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) have established capabilities and are also overcoming new challenges. We have a quality management system, an O&M platform, and a global expert team. More importantly, we have worked with many customers to improve their application stability and have found better ways to make applications and platforms cost-effective, high-quality, and efficient.

FinOps, a combination of "Finance" and "DevOps", is a management practice that organizations use to optimize the financial performance of their cloud computing infrastructure. FinOps Foundation defines FinOps as "an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of cloud and technology, enables timely data-driven decision making, and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams." Cloud cost management needs continuous optimization as enterprise cloud resource consumption runs through the entire cloud adoption process.

The FinOps framework defines a simple lifecycle with three phases: Inform (cost visibility), Optimize (cost optimization), and Operate (cost operations), to guide enterprises through cost optimization. Enterprises need to balance cost, quality, and efficiency during cost optimization to prevent extremely low costs from affecting business efficiency and stability. Within an organization, different service teams may be at varying phases of implementing FinOps practices. The FinOps framework guides enterprises to manage cloud costs in a refined manner through collaboration across teams and data-based decision-making. Costs of each service team are visible, enabling proactive control over overspending and waste. Enterprises make data-based decisions on cloud investment to prioritize spending on essential and strategic services. With FinOps, enterprises can continuously reduce the unit business cost.

Many current enterprise applications hinder business growth. Outdated, complicated, and inflexible systems are hard to upgrade. Maintaining costly infrastructure increases expenses. Complex deployment processes delay releases. Existing architectures and technologies fail to meet modern software needs. These issues create significant challenges for enterprises. But most enterprises still rely on these applications as essential components of their operations to deliver key functions and store critical data. Developers and operations personnel managing existing applications are dealing with growing IT complexity, rising tech debt, skill gaps, and security threats. These issues can slow innovation and block business success.

To address these challenges, WAF provides optimization suggestions for enterprises that have a large number of existing applications. Enterprises can improve the resilience, security, performance, and resource utilization of existing applications, adapt to modern software development, and reduce operations costs.

Huawei Cloud defines and maintains a full set of partner competency certifications. Partners meeting the necessary skill requirements will obtain such certifications.

By learning WAF, partners can understand and refer to the best practices of each pillar on the cloud to obtain more professional knowledge about cloud architecture designing. Partners should follow these best practices when designing solutions or offering professional services for customers to enhance architecture design quality and improve workloads consistently. Partners who submit real use cases and pass Huawei Cloud's review will receive certifications for their expertise in specific domains, scenarios, or industries.