The Six Pillars

1. Operational excellence

The ability to operate all of your infrastructure and operations as code

• Perfoming operations as code
• Make frequent, small, reversible changes
• Refine Operations procedures frequently
• Anticipate failure

2. Performance efficiency

The ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet your system requirements and maintain that as you scale

• Making sure you scale in small increments to avoid "over-scaling"
• Democratize advanced technologies
• Go global in minutes
• User serverless architectures
• Experiment more often
• Mechanical sympathy

3. Security

Protecting your workloads and intellectual property

• Implement a strong identity foundation
• Enable traceability
• Apply security at all layers, don't focus security policy in ONE layer
• Automate security best practices
• Protect data in transit and at rest
• Keep people away from data
• Prepare for security events

4. Reliability

The ability of a workload to perform its intended function when it's expected to

• Test recovery procedures
• Automatically recover from failure
• Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability
• Stop guessing capacity
• Manage change in automation

5. Cost optimization

The ability to run system to deliver business value at the lowest price point

• Adopt to consumption model
• Measure overall efficiency
• Stop spending money on data center operations
• Analyze and attribute expenditure
• Use managed services to reduce cost of ownership

6. Sustainability

Ability to focus on environmental impacts, energy consumption

• Undestand your impact
• Establish sustainability goals
• Maximize utilization
• Adopt new features
• Use managed services

Whitepapers

Framework Overview

This gives you an introduction to the well architected framework, as well as defining what it is and what it can be used for

Pillar Whitepapers

Provides a detailed recommendations for each Pillar

Lens Whitepaper

Deep dive into specific applications