By John Flavin | Senior Vice President

Well-Architected Review

While most IT teams deploy workloads in accordance with industry best practices, few take the time to review and evaluate their application architecture on a regular basis. And given the near-constant emergence of new cloud migration services – not to mention cybersecurity threats – doing so is the only way to ensure that your environment remains optimized for performance and risk.

Leveraging the AWS well-architected framework enables companies to maximize AWS cloud benefits. It helps you to establish processes, guidelines and architectural principles based on outcomes drawn from real-world situations that solve complex business problems without impacting performance or cost.

What is the AWS Well-Architected Framework?

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps IT teams design, build and run secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for a variety of applications and workloads. The framework consists of design principles, questions, and AWS best practices across the following six pillars:

  1. Operational Excellence
  2. Security
  3. Reliability
  4. Performance Efficiency
  5. Cost Optimization
  6. Sustainability (new as December 2021)

What is an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review (AWS WAR)?

An AWS Well-Architected Review is a measurable approach for assessing how well an organization’s architecture aligns with the six key framework pillars. Well-Architected Reviews enable IT teams to evaluate and optimize architectures as new features and cloud services are made available.

As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, NorthBay Solutions specializes in AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviews. To date, NorthBay Solutions has conducted thousands of architecture reviews with clients and in partnership with AWS.

What is the NorthBay Solutions process for conducting Well-Architected Reviews?

  1. Conduct a 4- to 6-hour review session that can be split over multiple days with your team to learn about a specific workload in your environment. This involves a series of questions aligned to the framework which we then benchmark against AWS's proven best practices and guidelines.
  2. Within a week, participants receive a Well-Architected Assessment Report with recommendations explaining areas of improvement. These recommendations are categorized and prioritized as high and medium based on the severity of impact.

NorthBay Solutions Well-Architected Reviews are conducted at no charge, and your organization also may be eligible for $5,000 of credit from AWS account should you engage us to help remediate 25% of your High-Risk Issues (HRIs).

Simply said, our goal is to provide our customers with the highest integrity and performing workloads possible for today and into the future.

Want to learn a bit more? Check out this 5 minute video on “What happens during a Well-Architected Review”.

Or, contact us now to schedule your free AWS Well-Architected Review.