AWS Well-Architected Framework
A vendor-published, freely-available set of design principles you can use on any cloud — not just AWS. Six pillars, each with concrete questions to ask of an architecture. Same ideas appear in Azure WAF and GCP Architecture Framework under different names.
Operational Excellence
Security
Reliability
Performance Efficiency
Cost Optimization
Sustainability
Read the framework's questions, not just the principles. AWS publishes ~50 questions across the six pillars — each is a tractable conversation you can have with a team. "How do you mitigate deployment risks?" is more useful than "be operationally excellent."
// links: aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected · learn.microsoft.com/azure/well-architected · cloud.google.com/architecture/framework
Your team is debating whether to use a managed Kubernetes service (EKS) or self-host K8s on EC2 to save licensing fees. Which Well-Architected pillar most directly weighs against self-hosting?
// pick one to verify