⭐ Repository → 💼 AWS Well-Architected → 💼 Performance Efficiency → 💼 Networking and content delivery

💼 PERF04-BP01 Understand how networking impacts performance

• ID: /frameworks/aws-well-architected/performance-efficiency/networking-and-content-delivery/bp01

Description

Analyze and understand how network-related decisions impact your workload to provide efficient performance and improved user experience.

Common anti-patterns

• All traffic flows through your existing data centers.
• You route all traffic through central firewalls instead of using cloud-native network security tools.
• You provision AWS Direct Connect connections without understanding actual usage requirements.
• You don’t consider workload characteristics and encryption overhead when defining your networking solutions.
• You use on-premises concepts and strategies for networking solutions in the cloud.

Benefits of establishing this best practice

Understanding how networking impacts workload performance helps you identify potential bottlenecks, improve user experience, increase reliability, and lower operational maintenance as the workload changes.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: High

Implementation guidance

The network is responsible for the connectivity between application components, cloud services, edge networks, and on-premises data, and therefore it can heavily impact workload performance. In addition to workload performance, user experience can also be impacted by network latency, bandwidth, protocols, location, network congestion, jitter, throughput, and routing rules.

Have a documented list of networking requirements from the workload including latency, packet size, routing rules, protocols, and supporting traffic patterns. Review the available networking solutions and identify which service meets your workload networking characteristics. Cloud-based networks can be quickly rebuilt, so evolving your network architecture over time is necessary to improve performance efficiency.

Implementation steps

1. Define and document networking performance requirements, including metrics such as network latency, bandwidth, protocols, locations, traffic patterns (spikes and frequency), throughput, encryption, inspection, and routing rules.

2. Learn about key AWS networking services like VPCs, AWS Direct Connect, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), and Amazon Route 53.

3. Capture the following key networking characteristics:

   • Foundational networking characteristics:

     • VPC Flow Logs
     • AWS Transit Gateway Flow Logs
     • AWS Transit Gateway metrics
     • AWS PrivateLink metrics

   • Application networking characteristics:

     • Elastic Fabric Adapter
     • AWS App Mesh metrics
     • Amazon API Gateway metrics

   • Edge networking characteristics:

     • Amazon CloudFront metrics
     • Amazon Route 53 metrics
     • AWS Global Accelerator metrics

   • Hybrid networking characteristics:

     • AWS Direct Connect metrics
     • AWS Site-to-Site VPN metrics
     • AWS Client VPN metrics
     • AWS Cloud WAN metrics

   • Security networking characteristics:

     • AWS Shield, AWS WAF, and AWS Network Firewall metrics

   • Tracing characteristics:

     • AWS X-Ray
     • VPC Reachability Analyzer
     • Network Access Analyzer
     • Amazon Inspector
     • Amazon CloudWatch RUM

4. Benchmark and test network performance:

   • Benchmark network throughput, as some factors can affect Amazon EC2 network performance when instances are in the same VPC. Measure the network bandwidth between Amazon EC2 Linux instances in the same VPC.
   • Perform load tests to experiment with networking solutions and options.

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