Well Architected Review

Step 3 -- Review Each Pillar

Evaluate the workload against all six Well-Architected Framework pillars. For each pillar, produce:

• Current state: What the workload does well in this area
• Risks identified: Specific gaps or concerns (rated High/Medium/Low)
• Recommendations: Actionable improvements with estimated effort

Pillar 1: Operational Excellence

Focus areas:

• Organization (team structure, runbooks, operational readiness)
• Prepare (design for operations, deployment practices)
• Operate (monitoring, alerting, incident response)
• Evolve (learn from operations, make improvements)

Key questions:

• How are deployments performed? Is rollback tested?
• What monitoring and alerting is in place?
• Are there runbooks for common operational scenarios?
• How are operational events and incidents tracked?

Pillar 2: Security

Focus areas:

• Identity and access management (IAM, least privilege, federation)
• Detection (CloudTrail, GuardDuty, SecurityHub)
• Infrastructure protection (VPC, security groups, WAF)
• Data protection (encryption at rest and in transit, key management)
• Incident response (forensic readiness, automation)

Key questions:

• Are IAM policies following least privilege?
• Is encryption enabled for data at rest and in transit?
• Are security monitoring services enabled?
• How are secrets managed?

Pillar 3: Reliability

Focus areas:

• Foundations (service quotas, network topology)
• Workload architecture (fault isolation, distributed system design)
• Change management (monitoring, auto-scaling, deployment practices)
• Failure management (backups, disaster recovery, fault tolerance)

Key questions:

• How does the workload handle component failures?
• What is the disaster recovery strategy?
• Are backups configured and tested?
• What is the defined RTO and RPO?

Pillar 4: Performance Efficiency

Focus areas:

• Selection (compute, storage, database, networking)
• Review (benchmarking, load testing)
• Monitoring (performance metrics, alarms)
• Trade-offs (caching, read replicas, edge locations)

Key questions:

• Are services sized appropriately for the workload?
• Is caching used where beneficial?
• Are there performance bottlenecks?
• Has the workload been load tested?

Pillar 5: Cost Optimization

Focus areas:

• Cloud financial management (cost awareness, budgets)
• Expenditure and usage awareness (tagging, cost allocation)
• Cost-effective resources (right-sizing, pricing models)
• Manage demand and supply (auto-scaling, queue-based architectures)
• Optimize over time (review new services, evaluate alternatives)

Key questions:

• Are resources right-sized based on actual usage?
• Are commitment discounts (Savings Plans, RIs) in use?
• Is cost allocation tagging in place?
• Are there idle or underutilized resources?

Pillar 6: Sustainability

Focus areas:

• Region selection (carbon intensity, proximity to users)
• User behavior patterns (demand shaping, async processing)
• Software and architecture patterns (efficient algorithms, managed services)
• Data management (lifecycle policies, cold storage tiering)
• Hardware and services (right-sizing, Graviton instances)

Key questions:

• Are resources scaled down during off-peak hours?
• Is data lifecycle management in place (S3 tiering, log retention)?
• Are managed services preferred where appropriate?
• Are Graviton instances used where compatible?

Step 4 -- Produce the Report

Compile findings into a structured report:

# Well-Architected Review: [Workload Name]

> Reviewed on [date]

## Summary

[2-3 sentence overview of the workload's Well-Architected alignment]

**Overall Risk Level:** [Low / Medium / High]

| Pillar | Rating | High Risks | Medium Risks | Low Risks |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Operational Excellence | [Good/Fair/Needs Work] | [N] | [N] | [N] |
| Security | [Good/Fair/Needs Work] | [N] | [N] | [N] |
| Reliability | [Good/Fair/Needs Work] | [N] | [N] | [N] |
| Performance Efficiency | [Good/Fair/Needs Work] | [N] | [N] | [N] |
| Cost Optimization | [Good/Fair/Needs Work] | [N] | [N] | [N] |
| Sustainability | [Good/Fair/Needs Work] | [N] | [N] | [N] |

## Pillar Details

### Operational Excellence

**Rating:** [Good/Fair/Needs Work]

**Current State:**
[What the workload does well]

**Findings:**

| # | Risk | Severity | Recommendation | Effort |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | [description] | [H/M/L] | [action] | [S/M/L] |

[Repeat for each pillar]

## Prioritized Recommendations

[Top 5-10 recommendations across all pillars, ordered by impact and effort]

| Priority | Pillar | Recommendation | Severity | Effort |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | [pillar] | [action] | [H/M/L] | [S/M/L] |

Step 5 -- Present and Offer Next Steps

Present the report and suggest follow-up actions:

• For high-severity security findings: "Ask the aws-solutions-architect agent for a detailed security review of the affected resources"
• For cost concerns: "Ask the aws-solutions-architect agent to estimate costs for the affected services"
• For architectural decisions surfaced: "Document key decisions in your project's ADR format"