Well-Architected

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a structured set of questions for judging a workload against six pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimisation and sustainability. Its value is less in any single answer than in making a review repeatable. The same questions asked of every workload turn architecture opinions into a comparable, prioritised list of risks.

The Well-Architected Tool covers how a review is run in practice, what lenses add for particular kinds of workload, and how a custom lens encodes an organisation’s own standards alongside AWS’s.