Great Lakes Software Symposium - No Fluff Just Stuff

Great Lakes Software Symposium

June 10 - 12, 2022

Designing Well Architected Framework Workshop - Deep Dive

Sunday - Jun 12 4:00 PM CDT - STANFORD

Secure, Efficient, Resilient, High-performing, Sustainable, and Cost-effective

Are your applications well-architected? This talk will explore the best practices for operational excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and cost optimization. Think of systems and services which provide business values. Do you know if all of these services are well-architected? You will learn how to create mechanisms, a repeatable process that allows you to improve over time. We will explore the best practices using real-world examples to make them more concrete and actionable.

Well-Architected helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for various applications and workloads. They are built around six pillars—operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.

Join expert Rohit Bhardwaj to gain the knowledge and skills you need to solve current cloud implementation problems.

What you'll learn — and how you can apply it
By the end of this live, hands-on, online course, you'll understand the following:

– How to create responsive, maintainable, extensible architecture

– How to manage identities for people and machines and understand the significance of role-based, service-based, and attribute-based access

– How to design network topology and protect your network resources

– How to design interactions in a distributed system to prevent failures and improve performance and resiliency

– How to select the best-performing architecture and choose performant storage and databases

– How to manage demand and supply resources

– How to take advantage of user behavior patterns to support your sustainability goals

Topics covered:

Design Principles

– Scaling patterns

– Architecture Design Principles

– Capacity calculations

– Impact of data on design decisions

– Shared Responsibility Model

Reliability

– Resilient Architecture principles

– Herds of complex real-time distributed systems

– Hands-on Exercises / Case Studies

– Blast radius- fault isolation to protect your workload

– Availability patterns

– Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objectives

– Data backup data patterns

– Routing Strategies

– Service quotas and constraints

– Design your workload service architecture

– Failure management in a distributed system

– Monitoring workload resources

– Calculating the response times

– Fallacies of Distributed Systems

– Testing reliability

– Cost Optimization

– Design cost-optimized storage

– Cost-optimized compute

– Data transfer costs

– Manage demand and supply resources

– Hands-on Exercises / Case Studies

Sustainability
– User behavior patterns

– Data access and usage patterns

– Development and deployment processes

– Hands-on Exercises / Case Studies

Performance Efficiency
– Select the best-performing architecture

– Choosing performant storage and databases?

– No-SQL for performance

– Caching strategies

– DOS attacks

– Tradeoffs to improve performance

– Evolving your workload

– Handle skewed data

– CDN networks like Cloudfront to solve the caching requirements for static and Dynamic
contents

– Monitor and set alarms for performance and network issues

– Hands-on Exercises / Case Studies

Operational Excellence
– Principles for Perform Operation Infrastructure as code

– Annotate Documentation - PlayBooks - Part of code

– Create Runbooks - Server down

– Capture failures and analyze them using Events and Real-Time Actions

– KPIs for cloud dashboard

– Incidence response - Root Cause Analysis

– Hands-on Exercises / Case Studies

Security, Privacy, and Compliance
– Manage identities for people and machines

– Identify Access Management

 Role-Based, Service-Based, and Attribute-Based Access

– Securely operate your workload.

– Detect and investigate security events

– Web Application Firewall

– Virtual Private Cloud - design network topology

– Protecting your network resources

– Bastion Hosts

– Data classification

– Protecting data in Transit

– Protecting data at Rest

Hands-on Exercises / Case Studies

Rohit Bhardwaj

Rohit Bhardwaj

Director, AI & Data Architecture at Salesforce | Author | Enterprise AI

About Rohit Bhardwaj

Rohit Bhardwaj is a Director of AI & Data Architecture at Salesforce, where he focuses on enterprise AI, agentic systems, cloud-native architecture, distributed systems, data platforms, security, and large-scale transformation.

Over his career, Rohit has designed and led complex enterprise platforms across AWS, Google Cloud, microservices, real-time data, API ecosystems, resilient distributed systems, and AI-enabled architectures. His work increasingly focuses on the challenges enterprises face as software evolves from deterministic services to AI-native and agentic systems—particularly around reliability, governance, evidence, security, observability, cost, and safe autonomy.

Rohit is the author of System Design with AI Interview Guide: Designing Scalable, Agentic, and Defensible Systems, published by Apress. The book presents a modern approach to system design covering scalability, distributed systems, AI architecture primitives, security, reliability, economics, agentic systems, and real-world architectures including e-commerce, ride sharing, payments, fraud detection, messaging, video streaming, file storage, and search. (Springer Link)

Book:
Amazon: https://a.co/d/09Zs1twa
Publisher / Springer Nature: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/979-8-8688-2782-2
O'Reilly: https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/system-design-with/9798868827822/ 

Rohit is also an O’Reilly instructor and a frequent speaker at technology conferences including No Fluff Just Stuff, UberConf, GIDS, and other international events. His talks focus on practical architecture lessons from building and operating complex systems, including AI control planes, trusted agents, inference at scale, evidence-first RAG, AI security, distributed-system failure, and AI-era software architecture.

As a trusted advisor and architecture leader, Rohit works at the intersection of business strategy and deep technical architecture—helping teams translate complex business problems into scalable, resilient, secure, and economically sustainable systems.

Rohit holds an MBA in Corporate Entrepreneurship from Babson College and graduate-level education in Computer Science from Boston University and Harvard University.

Connect with Rohit:
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/rohit-bhardwaj-cloud
X / Twitter: @rbhardwaj1