AWS Well-Architected Tool FAQs

General

The AWS Well-Architected Tool lets you review your workloads against current AWS best practices and obtain advice on how to architect your workloads for the cloud. This tool uses the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework lets you review your architectures using a consistent approach and provides guidance to improve designs over time. Learn more.

The general design principles and specific AWS best practices and guidance are organized into six conceptual areas. These conceptual areas are the pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. These six pillars are operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.

A workload is the collection of resources and code that make up a cloud application.

A custom lens lets you review your workload using customized questions in the same way that you review workloads against the Well-Architected Framework and AWS-provided lenses. Custom lenses can include pillars, questions, answer choices, helpful resources, and improvement plans. For more information, refer to custom lenses in the User Guide.

You can review workloads against best practices across the Well-Architected Framework, AWS-provided lenses, and custom lenses. The AWS Well-Architected Tool delivers a list of potential issues found in your workloads and provides step-by-step guidance to make improvements. You can also view the potential issues found across your portfolio of workloads. You can tag each workload to help you manage your AWS WA Tool resources and assign your own metadata to each resource. Learn more

Share workloads and custom lenses that you own with other AWS accounts, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users in the same AWS Region as well as with AWS Organizations. Learn more.

You can also use the Well-Architected APIs to extend AWS Well-Architected functionality, best practices, measurements, and learnings into your existing architecture governance processes, applications, and workflows. Learn more.

You can access the AWS Well-Architected Tool by signing in to the AWS Management Console with your AWS account. After accessing the AWS Well-Architected Tool, you can define the workload for which you want to perform a Well-Architected review and then answer questions across each of the architectural pillars. The tool will evaluate your responses and provide an improvement plan with a prioritized list of issues for the workload.

We recommend performing a workload review at major milestones in your development cycle.

Availability and pricing

Visit the AWS Region Table for the current list of regions for the AWS Well-Architected Tool.

There is no additional charge for the AWS Well-Architected Tool. You pay only for your underlying AWS resources.

Partner Access

Locate a partner who has been trained on the AWS Well-Architected Framework.