The following tenets help the team make decisions about the content of this guide.
The primary audience of this guide are organizations adopting AWS.
Although it’s often helpful for customers to have AWS experienced people working with them in this early stage of adoption, our goal is to enable customers to be able to follow this guide on their own.
AWS and partners should also benefit from this guide as they assist customers in this early stage of the cloud adoption journey.
As a byproduct, the guide should serve as a means to help train new AWS and partner technologists as they begin to become familiar with the initial practical steps of customer adoption of AWS.
Engage customers, partners, and others out in the open from the start. Hook the effort into an external community.
Make the target audience and specific stage of adoption clear throughout the guidance.
Incorporate all guidance into a contiguous experience. Avoid inclusion of guidance and resources that don’t fit the story and journey. Take steps to position all references to other guidance in the content of the contiguous narrative.
Don’t overload customers with sophisticated and complicated capabilities prematurely in their journey when those capabilities aren’t useful in the early stage.
Balance this tenet with the interest in avoiding significant rework later in the journey.
Focus on the common underpinnings or foundational aspects of the journey that apply largely independent of specific workload types and industry verticals.
At least in the early stages of developing this guidance, defer to other resources to address workload- and industry-specific needs.
Don’t boil the ocean. Focus on the early “project” stage of formal adoption of AWS. Provide pathways to other guidance and offerings that help customers through the later “foundation” stage of adoption.
Address the most common scenarios first.
Help bias customers toward making incremental, additive investments in their AWS environments. Avoid investments that involve substantial rework in later stages of the cloud adoption journey.
Where feasible, defer to existing resources rather than reinvent the wheel in this guide.
Defer to up-to-date existing resources to help customers understand key concepts.
When there’s modular, to-the-point official documentation and suitable sample code that can be linked to, we prefer that route vs duplicating lengthy instructions and maintaining sample code within this guide.
However, when any of the following conditions apply, in the interest of providing a cohesive user experience, we don’t hesitate to embed instructions inline:
Over time, the detailed guidance should continually reduce in scope as more features are built into the platform.
As more capabilities are built into the AWS platform and additional best practices are developed, ensure that this guidance is kept up-to-date.