AWS Well-Architected Framework encapsulates key concepts, design principles, and architectural best practices for designing and running workloads in the cloud. These have been distilled by AWS Solution Architects from their many years of experience of building solutions across virtually all business verticals and use cases, and designing and reviewing thousands of customers’ architectures on AWS.

The Six Pillars:

• Operational Excellence: Focuses on running and monitoring systems, and continually improving processes and procedures (automating changes, responding to events, and defining standards to manage daily operations

• Security: Focuses on protecting information and systems (data confidentiality and integrity, user permissions management, detecting security events)

• Reliability: Focuses on workloads performing as intended and recovering from failure quickly (distributed system design, recovery planning, adapting to changing requirements)

• Performance Efficiency: Focuses on structured and streamlined allocation of cloud resources (rightsizing and optimal resource types, performance monitoring)

• Cost Optimization: Focuses on avoiding unnecessary costs (understanding and controlling your cloud spend, selecting resources of the right type and quantity, scaling without overspending)

• Sustainability: Focuses on minimizing the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads (shared responsibility model for sustainability, understanding impact, maximizing utilization to minimize resource requirements)

Well-Architected Reviews (WARs) rely on the six Framework pillars to identify best practice gaps and the appropriate remediation. They also help customers discover previously unknown issues or hidden architectural debt in their systems. Additionally, Well-Architected Reviews help customers keep pace with the ongoing innovation of the AWS platform itself.

We advise customers to focus the Well-Architected Review on a high-priority workload, both during the initial design phase and at key milestones in that system’s lifecycle.

Well-Architected Review benefits:

• Engage with proven experts to get actionable and reliable guidance based on the latest AWS architecture best practices

• Analyze and remediate pressing concerns, or uncover unknown potential issues

• Identify and address security and compliance risks

• Optimize your cloud costs by rightsizing and fine-tuning your cloud resources and taking advantage of AWS pricing models

• Keep evolving and improving your solutions by leveraging the latest innovations from AWS services

• Achieve better alignment between your technical and business objectives through the collaborative engagement of key stakeholders from engineering, infrastructure, IT operations, SRE, support, InfoSec, product, finance, and other groups