Foundations

Foundational requirements are those whose scope extends beyond a single workload or project. Before architecting any system, foundational requirements that influence reliability should be in place. For example, you must have sufficient network bandwidth to your data center.

In an on-premises environment, these requirements can cause long lead times due to dependencies and therefore must be incorporated during initial planning. With AWS however, most of these foundational requirements are already incorporated or can be addressed as needed. The cloud is designed to be nearly limitless, so it’s the responsibility of AWS to satisfy the requirement for sufficient networking and compute capacity, leaving you free to change resource size and allocations on demand.

The following sections explain best practices that focus on these considerations for reliability.