The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides a consistent approach for customers and partners to evaluate architectures, and implement designs that can scale over time.

The Six Pillars

1. Operational Excellence — ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value. Key practices: Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation), CI/CD pipelines, small reversible changes.
2. Security — protecting information and systems. Key practices: implement a strong identity foundation, enable traceability, apply security at all layers, automate security best practices, protect data in transit and at rest.
3. Reliability — ability to recover from failures and dynamically acquire resources. Key practices: test recovery procedures, automatically recover from failure, scale horizontally.
4. Performance Efficiency — using computing resources efficiently. Key practices: use serverless architectures, experiment more often, go global in minutes.
5. Cost Optimisation — avoiding unnecessary costs. Key practices: adopt a consumption model, measure overall efficiency, stop spending on undifferentiated heavy lifting.
6. Sustainability — minimising environmental impacts. Key practices: understand your impact, maximise utilisation, use managed services.