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

💼 PERF04-BP02 Evaluate available networking features

• ID: /frameworks/aws-well-architected/performance-efficiency/networking-and-content-delivery/bp02

Description

Evaluate networking features in the cloud that may increase performance. Measure the impact of these features through testing, metrics, and analysis. For example, take advantage of network-level features that are available to reduce latency, network distance, or jitter.

Common anti-patterns

• You stay within one Region because that is where your headquarters is physically located.
• You use firewalls instead of security groups for filtering traffic.
• You break TLS for traffic inspection rather than relying on security groups, endpoint policies, and other cloud-native functionality.
• You only use subnet-based segmentation instead of security groups.

Benefits of establishing this best practice

Evaluating all service features and options can increase your workload performance, reduce the cost of infrastructure, decrease the effort required to maintain your workload, and increase your overall security posture. You can use the global AWS backbone to provide the optimal networking experience for your customers.

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

Implementation guidance

AWS offers services like AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon CloudFront that can help improve network performance, while most AWS services have product features (such as the Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration feature) to optimize network traffic.

Review which network-related configuration options are available to you and how they could impact your workload. Performance optimization depends on understanding how these options interact with your architecture and the impact that they will have on both measured performance and user experience.

Implementation steps

1. Create a list of workload components.

   1. Consider using AWS Cloud WAN to build, manage, and monitor your organization's network when building a unified global network.

   2. Monitor your global and core networks with Amazon CloudWatch Logs metrics. Leverage Amazon CloudWatch RUM, which provides insights to help to identify, understand, and enhance users’ digital experience.

   3. View aggregate network latency between AWS Regions and Availability Zones, as well as within each Availability Zone, using AWS Network Manager to gain insight into how your application performance relates to the performance of the underlying AWS network.

   4. Use an existing configuration management database (CMDB) tool or a service such as AWS Config to create an inventory of your workload and how it’s configured.

2. If this is an existing workload, identify and document the benchmark for your performance metrics, focusing on the bottlenecks and areas to improve. Performance-related networking metrics will differ per workload based on business requirements and workload characteristics. Metrics to review might include: bandwidth, latency, packet loss, jitter, and retransmits.

3. If this is a new workload, perform load tests to identify performance bottlenecks.

4. For the performance bottlenecks you identify, review the configuration options for your solutions to identify performance improvement opportunities. Key networking options and features include:

   • Network path or routes: Use Network Access Analyzer to identify paths or routes.
   • Network protocols: See PERF04-BP05 Choose network protocols to improve performance.
   • Network topology: Evaluate tradeoffs between VPC Peering and AWS Transit Gateway. Share your AWS Transit Gateway between multiple accounts using AWS Resource Access Manager. See PERF04-BP03 for dedicated connectivity or VPN.
   • Network services: AWS Global Accelerator, Amazon CloudFront, Lambda@edge, Amazon Route 53 routing options (latency-based, geolocation, geoproximity, IP-based).
   • Storage resource features: Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration, Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points.
   • Compute resource features: Elastic Network Interfaces (ENA), placement group optimizations, Amazon Elastic Network Adapters, Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), Amazon EBS-optimized instances.

Similar

Sub Sections

Section	Sub Sections	Internal Rules	Policies	Flags	Compliance