What to Expect from a Well-Architected Review

A practical guide to what happens during a Well-Architected Review and why it matters for your cloud workloads.

A Well-Architected Review isn’t an audit. It’s not a pass/fail exam. It’s a structured conversation about your cloud workloads that identifies risks, highlights improvements, and gives you a clear plan to make things better.

How it works

The review is built around six pillars:

  1. Operational Excellence - how you run and monitor your workloads
  2. Security - protecting your data and systems
  3. Reliability - recovering from failures and meeting demand
  4. Performance Efficiency - using resources effectively
  5. Cost Optimisation - avoiding unnecessary spend
  6. Sustainability - minimising environmental impact

For each pillar, we work through a series of questions about your architecture, processes, and practices. It’s collaborative - we’re not there to judge, we’re there to find opportunities.

What you get

At the end of a review, you’ll have:

  • A clear picture of where your architecture stands today
  • A prioritised list of high-risk items that need attention
  • Specific, actionable recommendations for each finding
  • A remediation plan you can feed straight into your backlog

Who should do one?

Any organisation running production workloads in the cloud. Whether you built your infrastructure last month or five years ago, there’s always something to improve. We’ve conducted dozens of reviews and every single one has uncovered findings that made a material difference to security, reliability, or cost.

The best time to do a review is before something goes wrong. The second best time is now.