The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of best practices and principles for designing and operating systems on AWS, organized into pillars (operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, sustainability). It provides a structured way to evaluate and improve architectures.
The pillars
1. OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE → running and monitoring systems; automation; improvement
(IaC, observability, runbooks, learning from failures)
2. SECURITY → protect data and systems (IAM least privilege, encryption, defense in
depth, detection, incident response)
3. RELIABILITY → recover from failures, scale to meet demand (multi-AZ, auto scaling,
backups, disaster recovery, no single points of failure)
4. PERFORMANCE EFFICIENCY → use resources efficiently (right services/sizing, caching,
monitoring, adapting as needs change)
5. COST OPTIMIZATION → avoid unnecessary cost (right-sizing, reserved/spot, eliminate
waste, match spend to value)
6. SUSTAINABILITY → minimize environmental impact (efficient resource use)
