AWS Well-Architected Tool
AWS Well-Architected Tool provides a consistent process for documenting and reviewing workloads against AWS best practices and tracking improvement plans over time.
AI Practitioner focus
- Applies lenses and structured questions to identify high-risk issues and improvement recommendations.
- Uses the six pillars in the AWS Well-Architected Framework: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.
- Custom lenses extend review questions for organization- or technology-specific governance needs.
- Use it to review an AI workload’s architecture and operational risks; it does not monitor model quality, detect bias, or enforce compliance automatically.
- Distinguish it from AWS Trusted Advisor, which analyzes an AWS environment and generates service recommendations, and from SageMaker Model Monitor, which monitors deployed model behavior.
Key points
- A workload is the unit of review — a set of components that together deliver business value (for example a marketing website, an ecommerce site, or a mobile app backend). Workloads range from a simple static website to a complex microservices architecture.
- Milestones are snapshots that mark key changes in a workload’s architecture over time, such as design, testing, go-live, and later production changes; they let you track how a workload’s risk profile evolves across reviews.
- A review report is a downloadable (PDF) output of a workload review, summarizing the answers given and the risks identified at that point in time.
- An improvement plan is the prioritized list of recommended actions generated from a review, based on the risks identified for each best-practice question.
- Risks are labeled high-risk issues (HRIs) — architectural or operational choices that could significantly and negatively affect the business — and medium-risk issues (MRIs), which have a similar but lesser potential impact.
- The AWS Well-Architected Tool itself is free to use in the AWS console; you only pay for the underlying AWS resources in the workload being reviewed.
- Distinguish the Tool from the AWS Well-Architected Framework: the Tool is the free console service that runs structured reviews, tracks milestones, and produces improvement plans; the Framework is the underlying whitepaper content — the pillars and best practices — that the Tool’s questions are built from.