Well-Architected Framework

Learn strategies and best practices for architecting in the cloud

The Well-Architected Framework provides the resources and guidance to learn strategies and best practices for architecting in the cloud. Use the Framework to help you improve your architecture.

What is the Well-Architected Framework?

The Framework consists of key concepts, design principles, and architectural best practices used to design and run workloads in hte cloud. It helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads based on five pillars. The pillars include Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization.

The Framework also provides a consistent approach for customers and partners to evaluate trade-offs and implement designs that can scale over time.

When you look at the systems you or your customers are building, can you answer the question 'Are you well architected?'

What is the purpose of the Well-Architected Framework?

Every scenario is different. Whether you are preapring for a new launch, migration, or modernization -or evaluating the health of your workloads- its important to build architectures that deliver on your expectations. The Well-Architected Framework was developed by identifying common insights that made customers' architects on AWS successful. It was intended to help address reocurring customer problems with workloads and to take a comprehensive look at their architectures to identify areas of improvement based on AWS best practices.

Well-Architected exists to drive better outcomes for customers who build and operate workloads in the cloud.

What are the benefits of the Well-Architected Framework?

Integrating the Framework into your organization's processes can help your teams in several ways.

Build and deploy faster

Reduce firefighting, identify capacity management, and use automation to experiment and release value more often.

Lower or mitigate risks

Understand where you have risks in your architecture, and address them before they negatively impact your business.

Make informed decisions

Ensure you have made active architectural decisions, highlighting how they might impact your business outcomes.

Learn AWS best practices

Ensure your teams are aware of best practices we have learned by reviewing thousands of customers' architectures on AWS.

The process for reviewing an architecture is a constructive conversation about architectural decisions, not an audit mechanism.

How does the Well-Architected Framework guide my cloud journey?

The Well-Architected Framework is a mechanism to help drive better outcomes for customers who build and operate worloads in the cloud. When architecting the worloads, you may make trade-offs based on your business context.

These business decisions can drive your engineering priorities. You might optimize to reduce cost at the expense of reliability in development environments. Or, for mission-critical solutions, you might optimize reliability with increased costs.