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Architecture Review - Systematically Evaluate Workloads with the AWS Well-Architected Tool

Learn about architecture reviews using the AWS Well-Architected Tool. Covers evaluation based on the six pillars, improvement planning, and custom lens usage.

About 5 min readWritten and edited by Awashiro

The Well-Architected Framework and Review Tool

The AWS Well-Architected Framework systematizes cloud architecture best practices into six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. The Well-Architected Tool is a managed tool that evaluates workloads based on this framework, identifying architecture improvements through a question-based review. Multiple questions are provided for each pillar, and based on your answers, High Risk Issues (HRI) and Medium Risk Issues (MRI) are automatically identified.

Workload Evaluation and Improvement Planning

Using the Well-Architected Tool starts with defining a workload. You specify the workload name, description, target AWS accounts, regions, and select the lenses to apply (AWS Well-Architected Framework lens, Serverless lens, SaaS lens, etc.). As you answer questions for each pillar, your compliance with best practices is displayed on a dashboard. The Improvement Plan shows a prioritized list of HRIs and MRIs, with specific improvement recommendations and links to reference documentation for each item. The milestone feature lets you save snapshots of evaluation results and compare progress after implementing improvements. The recommended operational pattern is to conduct reviews quarterly and track improvement trends using milestones.

Custom Lenses and Organizations Integration

Custom lenses let you define your organization's unique best practices and industry-specific requirements as evaluation criteria. You define a lens in JSON format with custom pillars, questions, best practices, and improvement plans. For example, you can create custom lenses to evaluate compliance with financial industry regulations, internal security policies, or adherence to specific architecture patterns. Organizations integration allows you to share custom lenses across all accounts in your organization, conducting reviews with unified evaluation criteria. There is no additional charge for using the Well-Architected Tool itself, but being free is not the same as being unlimited. Under the official service quotas (as of August 2026), you can create up to 15 custom lenses per account per region, share a single lens with up to 300 recipients, and associate up to 20 lenses with a single workload; all of these are fixed values that cannot be increased by request. When designing how lenses are distributed across an organization, narrow down their use with these limits in mind. While Trusted Advisor performs automatic resource-level checks (S3 public access settings, unused EC2 instances, etc.), the Well-Architected Tool provides interactive architecture-level reviews (Is the DR strategy appropriate? Is the monitoring setup sufficient?), serving a complementary role.

Well-Architected Tool Pricing

There is no additional charge for using the Well-Architected Tool, and conducting reviews or saving milestones does not incur any fees in itself. You pay only for the AWS resources being evaluated. Sharing custom lenses across the organization via Organizations integration also incurs no additional charges. However, being free of charge is not the same as having no limit on how many you can create. Under the official service quotas (as of August 2026), the limits are 1,000 workloads per account per region, 100 milestones per workload, and 500 review templates per account per region, none of which can be increased by request. If you consolidate hundreds of workloads into a single account, or create a new workload for every review, it is safer to keep these limits in mind and decide on naming conventions and account separation in advance. It is recommended to establish a habit of quarterly reviews and use the tool for continuous architecture improvement.

Summary - Guidelines for Using the Well-Architected Tool

The AWS Well-Architected Tool systematically evaluates workload architecture across six pillars. Its key strengths are question-based reviews, automatic HRI/MRI identification, improvement plan creation, and custom lenses for organization-specific evaluation. It is free to use, and quarterly reviews of production workloads are recommended. It can also be used for pre-launch reviews of new workloads.

References (Official AWS Resources)

The primary sources for this page are the official AWS website and documentation. Check the official pages below for the latest specifications and pricing.

If this page and the official documentation disagree, treat the official documentation as authoritative.

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AWS Well-Architected Tool SpecializedA tool for reviewing workload architecture based on the AWS Well-Architected FrameworkAWS Trusted Advisor SpecializedA service that checks your AWS environment for cost optimization, performance, security, and resilience improvementsAWS Config PopularA service that records and evaluates AWS resource configuration changes and continuously monitors compliance

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