The AWS Architecture Center is designed to provide you with the necessary guidance and application architecture best practices to build highly scalable and reliable applications in the AWS Cloud. These resources will help you understand the AWS platform, its services and features, and will provide architectural guidance for design and implementation of systems that run on the AWS infrastructure.

Adobe Flash Player or a modern browser is required to view videos on this site.

tma-capital-one
3:33

In this episode of This is My Architecture, Kapil Thangavelu, Director of Engineering at Capital One, explains their open-sourced rules engine for fleet management: Cloud Custodian. You'll see how Capital One uses this tool and a simple YAML-based DSL to eliminate the need to manage hundreds or thousands of scripts and policies, and offer "real-time" compliance and cost management at scale.

This video is part of the This Is My Architecture (TMA) series for technical audiences. This series showcases innovative architectural solutions designed by AWS customers and partners. Be sure to check out the other videos in the series.

AWS Quick Start reference deployments help you rapidly deploy fully functional software on the AWS Cloud, following AWS best practices for security and availability. An AWS CloudFormation template automates the deployment, and a deployment guide describes the architecture and implementation in detail. Quick Starts are modular and customizable; you can layer additional functionality on top or modify them for your own implementations. Use Quick Starts to deploy the following solutions on AWS:

Build a small or medium-sized Microsoft Lync Server 2013 environment on AWS with high availability and disaster recovery. The guide also provides guidance for larger deployments. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Deploy Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 with Active Directory Domain Services in a highly available architecture on AWS, choosing a new or  existing VPC. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Build a Microsoft Windows PowerShell DSC pull or push server environment on AWS, using Active Directory and Remote Desktop Gateway. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Deploy Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016 on AWS, using SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups with WSFC as the database tier. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Build a secure remote administration solution on AWS, using RD Gateway and RDP to access Windows-based instances. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Deploy Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) and Domain Name Server (DNS) on AWS, and choose from three deployment scenarios. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Implement a HA solution with Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Deploy Web Application Proxy and Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) into a new or existing VPC, following AWS best practices. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Build a multi-node SAP HANA cluster on AWS. You can use SLES or RHEL, and build the infrastructure from scratch or deploy SAP HANA into an existing VPC. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Deploy SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA, into a new or existing VPC in the AWS Cloud, following AWS best practices. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Build a multi-node Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub (EDH) cluster by integrating Cloudera Director with AWS services. Choose a new or existing AWS infrastructure.
View guide: HTML | PDF

Deploy MongoDB on AWS in a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective way. You can choose a new or existing AWS infrastructure for your deployment. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Deploy Trend Micro Deep Security in the AWS Cloud, using AWS best practices. Supports two licensing options: BYOL and Per Protected Instance Hour. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Build an e-commerce solution rapidly with Magento in the AWS Cloud. The Quick Start automatically deploys Magento into a new or existing AWS infrastructure.
View guide: HTML | PDF

Take advantage of Ansible playbooks, centralized logging, auditing, and system tracking, and manage your EC2 instances with Ansible Tower on the AWS Cloud. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Manage your dynamic cloud infrastructure or on-premises servers by deploying Chef Server on AWS. Uses the official Chef Server AMI and supports 5-250 nodes. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Deploy an architecture for NIST SP 800-53 and 800-171, OMB TIC - FedRAMP Overlay (pilot), and DoD Cloud Computing SRG. This is an AWS Enterprise Accelerator - Compliance offering. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Maintain consistency and reliability across your IT infrastructure with Puppet on the AWS Cloud. This Quick Start deploys a Puppet master and creates Puppet agents in a VPC. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Deploy an architecture that helps support Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) compliance on the AWS Cloud. This an AWS Enterprise Accelerator - Compliance offering. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Deploy five Microsoft business productivity servers (Lync, SharePoint, SQL, Exchange, Web Application Proxy with AD FS) along with AD DS to build your enterprise productivity platform on AWS. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Deploy an architecture for the NIST SP 800-53 high-impact control baseline, and assessment/authorization frameworks that include the requirements from this baseline. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Deploy Docker Enterprise Edition in a highly available AWS environment, following AWS and Docker best practices. Includes Universal Control Plane and Docker Trusted Registry. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy Splunk Enterprise on AWS to search, monitor, and analyze machine data from any source to gain valuable intelligence and insights across your entire organization. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy Spinnaker, the continuous software delivery platform from Netflix OSS, on AWS. An AWS CloudFormation template builds the AWS infrastructure and deploys Spinnaker in an Amazon VPC.
View guide: PDF

Deploy NGINX Plus, an application delivery platform from NGINX, Inc., on AWS. An AWS CloudFormation template builds the AWS infrastructure and deploys NGINX Plus in an Amazon VPC. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy a modular, scalable virtual network architecture with Amazon VPC, according to AWS best practices. You can use this deployment as a foundation for your AWS infrastructure. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Deploy Linux bastion hosts to gain secure remote access to your Linux instances in a new or existing VPC environment. You can use this deployment as a building block for your Linux deployments on AWS. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Deploy Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition with Oracle Data Guard and Oracle ASM on the AWS Cloud in a highly available, scalable environment. The automatic deployment takes about one hour. More »
View guide: HTML| PDF

Deploy Bitbucket Data Center, a source code management tool from Atlassian, on the AWS Cloud in a highly available, scalable environment. The automatic deployment takes less than 30 minutes. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy JIRA Software Data Center and JIRA Service Desk Data Center from Atlassian on AWS in less than 30 minutes. These solutions provide high availability, scalability, and performance. More »
View guide: PDF

Build a development environment for the Swift programming language, using Vapor as the web framework and Amazon ECS to create a scalable application stack on AWS. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy a continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline on AWS with MSBuild, IIS, Windows PowerShell, and .NET in combination with Jenkins, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS CodeDeploy. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy HashiCorp Consul on AWS in less than 10 minutes. This DevOps tool provides service discovery and configuration; health checking, a key/value store, and multiple datacenter support. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy HashiCorp Vault on AWS in less than 10 minutes. This tool secures, stores, and controls access to secrets across distributed infrastructure and applications from a central location. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy Big Data Management, which provides data integration and transformation services for large datasets, from AWS technology partner Informatica. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy PowerCenter, which integrates data from a vast array of data sources, including AWS services, from AWS technology partner Informatica. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy a standardized environment for workloads classified as United Kingdom (UK) OFFICIAL, aligned with NCSC principles and CIS controls. More »
View guide: HTML | PDF

Deploy an optimized AWS architecture with Alfresco Content Services for Enterprise Content Management (ECM). More »
View guide: PDF

Incorporate malware and threat detection technologies into your application with Symantec's security technology on AWS. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy Tableau Software's online solution for sharing, distributing, and collaborating on business intelligence content created in Tableau. More »
View guide: PDF

Use this Quick Start by Heptio to deploy a Kubernetes cluster on AWS. Kubernetes is an open-source container cluster management system for cloud workloads. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy Confluence Data Center into a configuration of your choice on AWS. Confluence Data Center is a team collaboration solution from Atlassian. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy Informatica Enterprise Information Catalog on AWS to catalog your enterprise data assets for self-service analytics and governance. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy Confluent Platform -- a streaming platform for large scale, distributed environments, built on Apache Kafka -- to enable connectivity for your interfaces. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy a SQL Server environment that receives its storage and enterprise-class data management capabilities from an ONTAP Cloud system running on AWS. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy a host-based replication solution that helps configure and manage high-availability SQL Server clusters on the cloud, and integrates seamlessly with WSFC. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy this cluster manager and scheduler from HashiCorp on AWS, to deploy your applications on any infrastructure, on premises or in the cloud. More »
View guide: PDF

Deploy the development and collaboration platform built on Git to build and share software easily and effectively. Includes in-depth monitoring and auditing. More »
View guide: PDF


The flexibility of AWS allows you to design your application architectures the way you like. AWS Reference Architecture Datasheets provide you with the architectural guidance you need in order to build an application that takes full advantage of the AWS cloud infrastructure. Each datasheet includes a visual representation of the application architecture and basic description of how each service is used.

Web Application Hosting
Build highly-scalable and reliable web or mobile-web applications (PDF)

Content and Media Serving
Build highly reliable systems that serve massive amounts of content and media (PDF)

Batch Processing
Build auto-scalable batch processing systems like video processing pipelines (PDF)

Fault tolerance and High Availability
Build systems that quickly failover to new instances in an event of failure (PDF)

Large Scale Processing and Huge Data sets
Build high-performance computing systems that involve Big Data (PDF)

Ad Serving
Build highly-scalable online ad serving solutions (PDF)

Disaster Recovery for Local Applications
Build cost-effective Disaster Recovery solutions for on-premises applications (PDF)

File Synchronization
Build simple file synchronization service (PDF)

Media Sharing
Cloud-powered Media Sharing Framework (PDF)

Online Games
Build powerful online games (PDF)

Log Analysis
Analyze massive volumes of log data in the cloud (PDF)

Financial Services Grid Computing
Build highly scalable and elastic grids for the Financial Services Sector (PDF)

E-Commerce Website Part 1: Web Frontend
Build elastic Web Front-ends for an e-Commerce website (PDF)

E-Commerce Website Part 2: Checkout Pipeline
Build highly scalable checkout pipeline for an e-Commerce website (PDF)

E-Commerce Website Part 3: Marketing and Recommendations
Build highly scalable recommendation engine for an e-Commerce website (PDF)

Time Series Processing
Build elastic systems that process time series data (PDF)


This paper describes the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which enables customers to assess and improve their cloud-based architectures and better understand the business impact of their design decisions. We address general design principles as well as specific best practices and guidance in four conceptual areas that we define as the pillars of the Well-Architected Framework. Download Whitepaper (PDF).

The cloud reinforces some old concepts of building highly scalable Internet architectures and introduces some new concepts that entirely change the way applications are built and deployed. To leverage the full benefit of the Cloud, including its elasticity and scalability, it is important to understand AWS services, features, and best practices. This whitepaper provides a technical overview of all AWS services and highlights various application architecture best practices to help you design efficient, scalable cloud architectures. Download Whitepaper (PDF).

AWS provides you with the necessary tools, features and geographic regions that enable you to build reliable, affordable fault-tolerant systems that operate with a minimal amount of human interaction. This whitepaper discusses all the fault-tolerant features that you can use to build highly reliable and highly available applications in the AWS Cloud. Download Whitepaper (PDF).

In the event of a disaster, you can quickly launch resources in Amazon Web Services (AWS) to ensure business continuity. The paper highlights relevant AWS features and services that you can leverage for your DR processes and shows example scenarios on how to recover from a disaster. It further provides recommendations on how you can improve your DR plan and leverage the full potential of AWS for your Disaster Recovery processes. Download Whitepaper (PDF).

Deploying an application on Amazon Web Services (AWS) is fast, easy, and cost-effective. This paper is targeted at developers and architects who are looking for operational and application architecture guidance from AWS to help assess their application’s operational readiness. It provides two checklists - Basic and Enterprise - so that you can evaluate your applications against a list of essential and recommended best practices and then deploy them with confidence. Download Whitepaper (PDF).

Hosting highly-available and scalable web applications can be a complex and expensive proposition. Traditional scalable web architectures have not only needed to implement complex solutions to ensure high levels of reliability, but have also required an accurate forecast of traffic to provide a high level of customer service. AWS provides the reliable, scalable, secure, and highly performing infrastructure required for the most demanding web applications – while enabling an elastic, scale-out and scale-down infrastructure model to match IT costs with real-time customer traffic patterns. This whitepaper will review Web application hosting solution in detail, including how each of the services can be used to create a highly available, scalable Web application. Download Whitepaper (PDF).

The AWS Cloud platform includes a variety of cloud-based data storage options. While these alternatives allow architects and developers to make design choices that best meet their application’s needs, the number of choices can sometimes cause confusion. In this whitepaper, we provide an overview of each storage option, describe ideal usage scenarios, and examine other important storage-specific characteristics (such as elasticity and cost) so that you can decide which storage option to use when. Download Whitepaper (PDF).

Security should be implemented in every layer of your cloud application architecture. In this whitepaper, you will learn about some specific tools, features and guidelines on how to secure your Cloud application in the AWS environment. We will suggest strategies how security can be built into the application from the ground up. Download Whitepaper (PDF).

To run a successful email program, you must be aware of a few topics that can affect your delivery and ultimately your impact on email recipients. You might send email for a variety of reasons, including enhancing an existing relationship with a customer, marketing new products and offers, educating a group of people sharing a common interest, or notifying customers of an event. In this whitepaper, we start by discussing the value attributed to your email by your recipients and the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) responsible for protecting their inboxes. Then we explain what the emailing process looks like, who’s involved, and what their roles are. Finally, you’ll learn how to optimize value and drive it up based on some best practices we’ve compiled. Download Whitepaper (PDF).


View recorded webinars on a variety of topics from Architectural Best Practices to Migrating Applications. To view only cloud architecture content, please select the "Architecture" playlist on our video player.