Reliability In Cloud Computing: AWS vs Azure vs GCP Strategy Comparison

That’s where the Well-Architected Framework (WAF) comes in. All three hyperscalers have created their own WAF, a set of guidelines and tenets within categories called pillars that help enterprise IT teams design, build, and maintain high-quality information systems. Before we look at these frameworks in detail, let’s first establish what we mean by reliability in the context of the cloud.

What’s Reliability in Cloud Computing?

In cloud computing, reliability refers to a system’s ability to perform its intended function consistently, even when faced with disruptions or increased demand. It goes beyond simple uptime to include fault tolerance, failover capabilities, data durability, and rapid recovery from unexpected issues. Compared to traditional on-premises infrastructure, cloud reliability is rooted in automation and architectural planning. It involves building systems that assume failure will happen and are prepared to respond without manual intervention. This includes strategies like load balancing, distributed architectures, and automated backup and recovery workflows. At its core, cloud reliability means creating systems that are resilient by design. That requires not only the right technology, but also the right operational practices and processes to support it.

What’s the Well-Architected Framework (WAF)?

The WAF is a methodology to help you evaluate where your team is today, where they need to be in terms of skills and processes, and finally to provide you with a structured approach to assess and execute the appropriate pillars.

They all agreed on the key pillars of WAF, with the sole exception of the Sustainability pillar, which is unique to AWS. Now, let’s look at the top-level pillars in alphabetical order:

Pillar	GCP	Notes
Cost Optimization		Focused on reducing waste, maximizing business values, and aligning spend with business priorities.
Operational Excellence		Focused on providing operational processes that keep systems running smoothly in production. All three emphasize the use of automation, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
Performance Efficiency	(as performance optimization)	Focused on using IT and computing resources efficiently and tuning resources for an optimal ratio of performance versus business value.
Reliability		Focused on designing and deploying resilient and highly available systems. All vendors emphasize the need for fault tolerance and rapid recovery, though AWS emphasizes failure planning more explicitly.
Security		Focus on threat mitigation, confidentiality, integrity, and compliance by protecting data, systems, applications, users, and assets.
Sustainability	(cross-cutting concern)	Focused on controlling and reducing long-term environmental impact. AWS uniquely includes this as a core pillar. Azure and GCP use other approaches to build sustainability.

Within each of the pillars are a variety of lessons, recommendations, workflows, processes, and useful tools to help you achieve the desired outcomes that are a priority for your organization.

Now, let’s examine the pillar most closely related to our theme of operational resilience: Reliability

Reliability and Operational Resilience

This topic is personal for me. Not only was reliability job #1 for me throughout my career as a database professional and DBA, but it was also a massive challenge to do well for the global enterprises I worked for. Today, reliability is no less a motivator for me since it is a key design concept across the entire line-up of SolarWinds® tools. So, what do the vendors have to say about Reliability?

First of all, keep in mind that the hyperscalers approach reliability with slight variations in their core philosophy. This initial differentiation can lead to some advice that isn’t always transferable to other cloud platforms. However, the advice of each vendor is always worth heeding if not outright following when on another cloud platform.

AWS, for example, focuses on designing your cloud estate with failure in mind from the start and then mitigating accordingly. Azure highlights close control of business continuity measures and a strong high availability (HA) mindset. GCP, on the other hand, invented the concept of the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) role. Consequently, their reliability pillar emphasizes an SRE-driven approach to reliability.

Reliability Pillar Commonalities

All vendors of their respective WAFs emphasize several key aspects within the Reliability pillar

Fault Tolerance: WAF stresses the importance of designing systems that can withstand and recover from failures. Fault-tolerant systems should incorporate features for a graceful degradation of services and, when necessary, high availability (HA) mechanisms. This includes HA redundancy technologies, like clustering with standby servers, and multi-region failover mechanisms across geographically distant data centers to ensure resilience in the face of natural disasters. AWS goes as far as to recommend using chaos engineering tests for fault tolerance.
Monitoring and Alerting: Continuous and proactive monitoring of system health and performance is crucial. All frameworks advocate for setting up alerts to detect and respond to issues promptly. With better observability, the frameworks also emphasize automated remediations. When automated remediation isn’t possible, the frameworks require clearly structured and defined service levels (SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs) and escalation paths. Unique to Google is attention to error budgets and blameless postmortems.
Backup and Recovery: Ensuring data is backed up and can be restored within an acceptable amount of time in case of failure is a shared priority. This includes regular and automated testing of backups and recovery drills. Effective backup and recovery strategies also include the concept of the data lifecycle, helping users to effectively determine how long to keep backups in the archive for long-term, multi-year retention.
Scalability: All frameworks highlight the need for systems to smoothly scale to handle varying workloads, ensuring consistent performance and availability. In addition, the use of load balancing and other horizontal scaling and stateless designs (e.g., microservices) can aid scalability while helping to keep costs under control.
Change Management: Implementing processes to manage system changes, including automated testing and validation, minimizing disruptions and maintaining reliability, and CI/CD pipelines to reduce risk. Other important aspects of this subpillar include canary releases, blue/green deployments, and automated rollback mechanisms for when deployments go bad.

Reliability Pillar Key Difference

Despite all the ways that the hyperscalers agree in their frameworks, they still have distinctive personalities and differences:

AWS: AWS puts a lot of emphasis on consistent change management for better reliability across outages, updates, and changes. It includes the ability to operate and test workloads throughout their entire data lifecycle, ensuring reliability from development to production to archival. AWS also emphasizes best practices for foundational architecture and infrastructure.
Azure: Azure places a strong emphasis on aligning reliability with business requirements, ensuring that the system meets specific business goals and user expectations. It highlights understanding platform limits, quotas, regions, and capacity constraints to ensure reliability. It also advocates for keeping designs simple to enhance reliability and reduce complexity. The Azure framework is more focused on aligning reliability with specific business requirements and user expectations.
GCP:The GCP framework is noticeably more human-centric, especially regarding the activities of SREs through the wide availability of SRE playbooks. A key underpinning of this framework is Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets. An error budget is the maximum allowable threshold of unreliability a service can have over a defined period before it violates its Service Level Objective (SLO). GCP is also more direct in its recommendations for continuous improvement, such as blameless postmortems, as well as meshing the SRE culture with developer and operations teams.

These key similarities and differences reflect the unique approaches each cloud provider takes to ensure reliable systems, tailored to their respective platforms and customer needs.

Final Recommendations for Reliability and Operational Resilience

Lastly, all these frameworks recommend these additional process requirements:

DevOps Practices: All frameworks advocate for the adoption of DevOps practices to ensure efficient and effective operations. This includes continuous integration, continuous deployment (CI/CD), and automated deployment and rollback, if needed.
Monitoring and Observability: Continuous monitoring and observability are crucial for maintaining operational excellence. All frameworks stress the importance of setting up comprehensive monitoring systems to track performance and detect issues.
Process Standardization: Standardizing processes and workflows across operational teams to minimize variability and reduce the chances of human error is a top priority. This helps ensure consistent, stable, and predictable operations.
Continuous Improvement: All frameworks emphasize the need for continuous improvement by learning from operational data and experiences. This involves regularly reviewing and refining processes to enhance efficiency and effectiveness, as well as postmortem meetings to ensure that major incidents are documented and that monitoring updates and automated remediation are enacted to ensure that the incident doesn’t cause repeated issues.
Team Collaboration: Many of the top software vendors in enterprise IT focus almost entirely on IT technology, with little thought given to the personnel who must work with that software. Not so with the WAF. Here, the vendors encourage collaboration between all relevant teams, from development and databases to security and operations, and consider collaboration essential for long-term success. All frameworks highlight the importance of fostering a culture of shared responsibility and teamwork.

World-Class Reliability and Resilience with Full-Stack Observability

One area where the Big 3 all agree is the critical need for strong monitoring, observability, and automated remediation. These elements are essential for maintaining reliable and resilient IT environments. For enterprises with cloud-hosted infrastructure, adopting comprehensive full-stack observability solutions can significantly enhance your ability to detect, troubleshoot, and resolve issues swiftly, elevating your overall IT performance and stability.

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