vishal patel
LearningFoundationUpdated 2026-09-23

AWS Well-Architected Framework

Six pillars for reviewing any cloud architecture — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimisation, sustainability.

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The six pillars

diagram

Questions I ask in a review

  • Reliability: what's the blast radius if one AZ fails? When did we last test a restore?
  • Security: who can read tenant data, and how would we know if they did?
  • Performance: which component saturates first at 10× load?
  • Cost: what's the cost per tenant or per request, and does it fall as we grow?
  • Ops: can a new engineer deploy safely on day one?
Note

Studying toward AWS Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03), with GCP Professional Cloud Architect next. This page grows as I go.

Cheatsheet

The whole topic on one page. Click to open full screen.

Sources & further learning

Videos, courses, docs and books I recommend for this topic.

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