DATADOG SOLUTION BRIEF
Accelerate Modernization
with the AWS Well-Architected
Framework and Datadog
Over the past decade, many forward-thinking enterprises have migrated data sets and
Introduction business-critical applications to the cloud in order to increase IT agility and compete
with born-in-the-cloud startups that have been disrupting the market dominance held
by long-standing industry players. While a great deal of effort and planning goes into
moving digital assets off-premises or rebuilding them in the cloud, an organization’s cloud
journey does not end with migration—in many ways, it’s only the beginning.
This guide provides IT executives, cloud migration leaders, and infrastructure
administrators with three foundational steps to ensure that their cloud, multi-cloud,
and hybrid-cloud infrastructures are well-architected, helping them achieve their
modernization goals and deliver long-term business value.
Accelerate Modernization with the AWS Well-Architected Framework and Datadog datadog.com
Accelerate Step 1: Define modernization goals.
Modernization Leveraging the cloud for modernization goes beyond migrating and refactoring data
and applications. 75 percent1 of the cloud’s business value lies in configuring a nimble,
efficient, and innovation-friendly IT infrastructure that delivers tangible business
outcomes such as cost savings, operational resilience, and staff productivity. IT leaders
must define modernization goals to address new operational challenges—including
unwieldy resource consumption, security threats, and lack of upskilling—to fully realize
the benefits of cloud-enabled modernization.
Step 2: Align your cloud strategy to well-architected frameworks.
In addition to having a migration strategy with achievable milestones and trackable
KPIs, successful modernization hinges on understanding how your organization is using
cloud services to maximize your investments. While cloud service providers (CSPs) like
AWS offer valuable best practices to help migrated technologies operate with increased
performance, scalability, reliability, and security, even the most proven framework does
not guarantee seamless IT modernization. This is where the adoption of an end-to-end
monitoring and observability platform becomes essential.
Step 3: Use unified observability to meet requirements.
Observability is a key component in ensuring that teams across the organization are
putting the principles of good cloud architecture into practice. A robust observability
platform provides comprehensive insights into application performance, security posture,
and operational health. This enables informed decision-making and helps teams architect
workloads in the cloud that are resilient, secure, and efficient.
Datadog supports over 700 integrations across all major CSPs, covering a wider range
of services and applications than any other observability platform. Through continuous
monitoring and end-to-end visibility across their cloud environments, organizations
can proactively identify and address issues, optimize their cloud operations, enhance
performance and security, and achieve business objectives with confidence and precision.
1. McKinsey Quarterly Five Fifty: Cloudy with a chance of billions
Accelerate Modernization with the AWS Well-Architected Framework and Datadog datadog.com
Step 1 Define modernization goals.
Before modernization efforts begin, identify goals and internal challenges. Examples
include maximizing cost savings by monitoring resource consumption, achieving
operational resilience with end-to-end visibility in hybrid-cloud environments, and
enhancing business agility through shared data sets, analysis, and collaboration.
Articulating these goals will help you understand what is missing and what changes you
need to make in order to meet AWS Well-Architected pillars and best practices in step 2.
Maximize cost savings by eliminating the need for large fixed spends on on-premises
infrastructure (which becomes a cost burden when left unused) and by paying only for
cloud compute resources you require and use.
Improve operational resilience with end-to-end security threat detection and business
continuity/disaster recovery strategies that failover business-critical systems to cloud-
enabled backup environments.
Bring advanced capabilities like big data analytics and AI/ML in-house (without creating
teams or building new software) through cloud adoption. Accelerate time to insights and
boost business agility.
Increase staff productivity by reskilling existing employees and bringing in new talent to
speed up releases, reduce errors, and proactively protect technologies from operational
and security threats.
Meet sustainability commitments and minimize the environmental impact of business
operations by gaining visibility into resource consumption, identifying and deprecating
technologies not delivering ROI, and reducing waste (as well as cost).
Accelerate Modernization with the AWS Well-Architected Framework and Datadog datadog.com
Step 2 Align your cloud strategy to well-architected frameworks.
Major CSPs like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offer resources that help customers
architect their cloud infrastructures to drive modernization and innovation. The AWS Well-
Architected Framework is instrumental for organizations aiming to navigate and overcome
the complexities of cloud adoption. By aligning their cloud strategies with the framework’s
comprehensive set of requirements and best practices, enterprises can better ensure
they are building secure, high-performing, and efficient infrastructure in the cloud that
supports business objectives and engineering requirements. This holistic approach not
only addresses specific short-term challenges while building systems, but also positions
organizations for cloud innovation and transformation in the long term.
Below are the six pillars defined by the AWS Well-Architected Framework:
Operational Excellence Security Reliability
Increase automation to reduce human Protect information and systems by Test business continuity and disaster
errors and accelerate administrative focusing on confidentiality and data recovery strategies to ensure you
tasks so your teams can focus integrity, managing user permissions, can recover quickly from disasters
on improving UI/UX, business-critical and establishing security controls and failures with little-to-no
systems, and threat detection. that meet internal and external end-user disruption.
GRC requirements.
Performance Efficiency Cost Optimization Sustainability
Design and configure infrastructure Understand resource consumption and Minimize environmental impact, meet
resources to take advantage of associated costs, deprecate unused sustainability goals, and be a good
cloud-native benefits, such as or underperforming technologies, and corporate citizen with monitoring tools
containers, advanced analytics, AI/ scale optimal systems. that provide real-time reports on IT
ML, and on-demand IT resourcing, resource consumption, helping you
to improve application performance optimize for performance and cost.
and data security.
Accelerate Modernization with the AWS Well-Architected Framework and Datadog datadog.com
Step 3 Use unified observability to meet requirements.
Datadog is an official partner to all major CSPs and possesses deep industry experience
and expertise in providing customers with solutions that align to architectural best
practices. With 10 AWS-validated capabilities across industry and solution competency
areas, Datadog’s modern unified observability platform offers specialized insights and
proven monitoring capabilities for optimization in near-real time.
Below are Datadog platform capabilities that support each pillar in the AWS Well-
Architected Framework:
Operational Excellence Security Reliability
– Near real-time anomaly detection – Automated responses to known and – Detailed understanding of AWS
to surface potential IT issues across emerging threats before they lead to infrastructure usage for services
your infrastructure environment outages and vulnerabilities like Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS,
Amazon RDS
– Automated event management to – Organization-wide identity
speed up responses and resolutions and access management (IAM) – Anomaly detection and alerting to
to known issues standards identify and diagnose issues before
they impact end-users and result
– Centralized log management for all – Detailed understanding of AWS in outages
AWS services for enterprise-wide security services being used, such
troubleshooting and optimization as AWS CloudTrail, AWS GuardDuty, – Digital experience monitoring for
AWS Security Hub, AWS WAF, end-to-end observability across all
and more tech stacks, applications, clouds, and
on-premises resources
Performance Efficiency Cost Optimization Sustainability
– Actionable insights into IT – Tools to provide transparency into and – Granular resource management to
utilization across all tech stacks enforce standards around IT resource find opportunities to reduce energy
and environments for infrastructure consumption and cost and/or resource consumption and
services, application traces, lower carbon footprint
performance metrics, and customer – Monitoring capabilities designed to
experience data find IT resources that are underutilized,
at-risk, or misconfigured
– On-demand auto-scaling for IT
resource procurement during
unexpected traffic spikes, disasters,
and other unplanned events
– Application performance
monitoring to measure and optimize
underperforming assets (includes
tracking CPU, memory, network usage,
and content delivery services)
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Full End-to-End Datadog regularly adds integrations with popular and industry-leading third-party
services, currently offering support for more than 700, including those for AWS like AWS
Visibility EKS and Amazon Lambda. Out-of-the-box dashboards for these integrations make it easy
to gain enterprise-scale visibility over the entire tech stack in minutes.
Below is a list of AWS integrations supported by the Datadog platform. Monitor your
service usage to align migration tactics to well-architected frameworks:
Operational Excellence Security Reliability
AWS Cloud Watch AWS CloudTrail AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
AWS Cost Explorer AWS GuardDuty Amazon Elastic Container
AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) AWS Security Hub Service (ECS)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) AWS Web Amazon Relational Database
Services (RDS)
AWS Lambda Amazon VPC
Amazon Relational Database AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Services (RDS)
Performance Efficiency Cost Optimization Sustainability
Amazon CloudFront AWS Auto-Scaling AWS AutoScaling
Amazon DynamoDB AWS CloudTrail AWS CloudTrail
AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) AWS CloudWatch AWS CloudWatch
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) Amazon DynamoDB Amazon DynamoDB
AWS Lambda Amazon Elastic BeanStalk Amazon Elastic Container
Amazon Relational Database Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
Services (RDS) Service (ECS) Amazon Elastic Kubernetes
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Service (EKS) AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Lambda AWS Lambda
Amazon Relational Database Amazon Relational Database
Services (RDS) Services (RDS)
AWS X-Ray AWS Simple Notification Service
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
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Results from FINANCIAL SERVICES
Datadog A global financial services institution migrated 60% of their infrastructure to AWS. By
Customers deploying Datadog’s unified monitoring for cloud and hybrid environments, they realized
efficiencies with tool consolidation, incident management, and collaboration between
teams. Ultimately, they achieved $5.6M in net savings while adding 38k more hosts by
the end of their cloud migration journey.
$5.6M +38K
in net savings hosts
CUSTOMER SERVICE SOLUTIONS
A leading customer service solution provider leveraged Datadog’s integrations with AWS
and Kubernetes to automatically correlate all their IT data into a single platform. With
visibility across 25 Kubernetes clusters and automated work streams for 60+ teams,
Datadog helped break down silos and enable engineering teams to spend more time
building innovative customer-facing applications.
25 60+
Kubernetes clusters and teams
automated work streams
FOOD & BEVERAGE RETAIL
A global food and beverage retailer used Datadog insights to identify idle hosts, reduce
compute waste, and autoscale on demand, resulting in a 50% carbon footprint
reduction while simultaneously tripling the number of global transactions on its
e-commerce platform.
50% 3x
carbon footprint global transactions
reduction
Next Steps
To experience the power of Datadog firsthand, we invite you to sign up for our free 14-day
trial through the AWS Marketplace. During this trial period, you’ll have full access to our
platform, allowing you to explore its features and capabilities tailored to your specific
DevOps deployment needs.
SIGN UP FOR FREE 14-DAY TRIAL
Accelerate Modernization with the AWS Well-Architected Framework and Datadog datadog.com
About Datadog Datadog is the monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. Our SaaS platform
integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring,
and log management to provide unified, real-time observability of our customers’ entire
technology stack. Datadog is used by organizations of all sizes and across a wide range of
industries to enable digital transformation and cloud migration, accelerate time to market
for applications, reduce time to problem resolution, secure applications and infrastructure,
understand user behavior, track key business metrics, and drive collaboration among
development, operations, security, and business teams.
Accelerate Modernization with the AWS Well-Architected Framework and Datadog datadog.com
