AWS Well-Architected Framework Cheat Sheet
The six pillars, design principles, and review workflow used to evaluate AWS workloads against best practices.
2 PagesIntermediateMar 19, 2026
The Six Pillars
The lenses used to evaluate any workload in a Well-Architected review.
- Operational Excellence- run and monitor systems, continuously improve processes
- Security- protect data, systems, and assets through risk assessment and mitigation
- Reliability- recover from failures, scale to meet demand, prevent disruptions
- Performance Efficiency- use computing resources efficiently, adapt as demand changes
- Cost Optimization- avoid unneeded spend, understand where money is going
- Sustainability- minimize environmental impact of running cloud workloads
Run a Review via CLI
Create and update a workload review using the AWS Well-Architected Tool API.
bash
# Register a workload for reviewaws wellarchitected create-workload \ --workload-name "orders-service" \ --description "Order processing microservice" \ --environment PRODUCTION \ --review-owner "platform-team@example.com" \ --lenses "wellarchitected" \ --aws-regions "us-east-1"# List answers for the Reliability pillaraws wellarchitected list-answers \ --workload-id abc123 \ --lens-alias wellarchitected \ --pillar-id reliability
General Design Principles
Cross-cutting principles that show up across multiple pillars.
- Automate everything- infrastructure as code, automated testing and deployment
- Scale horizontally- prefer many smaller resources over single large ones
- Stop guessing capacity- use elasticity instead of provisioning for peak
- Test at production scale- use ephemeral environments to validate real load
- Enable evolutionary architecture- design for change via loose coupling
- Data-driven decisions- use metrics to improve architecture over time
Pre-Review Prep Checklist
What to gather before running a Well-Architected review workshop.
yaml
review_prep: - architecture_diagram: current, includes data flows and trust boundaries - workload_context: business criticality, RTO/RPO targets - stakeholders: owner, security lead, on-call engineer present - existing_metrics: cost reports, CloudWatch dashboards, incident history - prior_review: link previous HRIs (high-risk issues) and their status
Pro Tip
Treat every High-Risk Issue (HRI) from a review as a tracked backlog item with an owner and due date — reviews that don't produce a remediation plan tend to get repeated with the same findings a year later.
Was this cheat sheet helpful?
Explore Topics
#AWSWellArchitectedFramework#AWSWellArchitectedFrameworkCheatSheet#CloudComputing#Intermediate#TheSixPillars#RunAReviewViaCLI#GeneralDesignPrinciples#Pre#CheatSheet#SkillVeris
Advertisement
Sri Hayavadhana Info-Tech
Professional Web Designing Services
- Responsive Websites
- E-commerce Solutions
- SEO Friendly Design
- Fast & Secure
- Support & Maintenance
