AWS Well-Architected Review
Free assessment for qualifying AWS workloads. We evaluate your environment against all 6 pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework — identifying risks, eliminating waste, and delivering a prioritized remediation roadmap in 2 weeks.
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Free AWS Well-Architected Review from FactualMinds. Identify risks, compliance gaps, and optimization opportunities.
A Well-Architected Review is a structured assessment of your AWS workloads against the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability. At re:Invent 2025, AWS expanded the framework with a Responsible AI Lens (bias mitigation, fairness assessment, explainability, output governance), refreshed the Machine Learning Lens around six pillars (adding Sustainability), and updated the Generative AI Lens with an agentic AI preamble and eight architecture scenarios. For AI/ML-heavy workloads we apply the relevant lens(es) alongside the core review. Reviews conducted by AWS Partners can qualify for AWS credits to fund remediation.
A security assessment focuses specifically on vulnerabilities, IAM configuration, encryption, and compliance. An architecture review covers security as one of six pillars but also evaluates operational practices, reliability, performance, cost efficiency, and sustainability. Think of the security assessment as a deep dive into one pillar, while the architecture review provides comprehensive coverage across all aspects of your cloud environment.
The review takes approximately 2 weeks. We need read-only access to your AWS account(s) via a cross-account IAM role, plus 2-3 hours of your team time for discovery interviews to understand your workloads, requirements, and priorities. We handle all the technical analysis independently.
Well-Architected Reviews conducted through the AWS Well-Architected Tool by an AWS Partner can qualify for AWS credits to help fund remediation of identified high-risk issues. The credit amount varies, but we help you maximize the available funding as part of the engagement.
We recommend a comprehensive review annually and focused reviews after major architectural changes, significant growth, or before compliance audits. Some organizations conduct quarterly lightweight reviews of their most critical workloads. The right cadence depends on how quickly your environment changes.
Yes. Most clients engage us to implement the remediation roadmap after the review. We can address quick wins immediately during the review engagement and plan longer-term improvements as a follow-on project. Our team covers security hardening, cost optimization, infrastructure-as-code, monitoring, and architectural refactoring.
## What is an AWS Well-Architected Review? An AWS Well-Architected Review is a structured assessment of a cloud environment against the [AWS Well-Architected Framework](https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/) — six pillars covering Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. The review identifies high-risk findings, scores each pillar, and produces a prioritized remediation roadmap. AWS Partners deliver the review using AWS's own Well-Architected Tool, with funding credits available for qualifying remediations. ## Why Your AWS Architecture Needs a Review Cloud environments evolve organically. Teams add resources, deploy new services, and make incremental changes over months and years. Without periodic review, this organic growth leads to architectural drift — security gaps widen, costs creep upward, and reliability risks accumulate silently until they surface as outages or audit failures. An architecture review provides a structured, objective assessment of your entire AWS environment. It answers the question every CTO and VP of Engineering needs answered: **Is our cloud architecture supporting our business, or is it holding us back?** At FactualMinds, we conduct architecture reviews using the [AWS Well-Architected Framework](/blog/aws-well-architected-framework-6-pillars-explained/) — a proven methodology that evaluates your environment across six critical dimensions. As an [AWS Select Tier Consulting Partner](/services/), our reviews qualify for AWS credits to fund remediation of identified issues. ### Free Well-Architected Review vs. Paid Architecture Audits | Dimension | AWS Well-Architected Review (Partner-led) | Generic third-party audit | DIY internal review | | -------------------------- | ------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------ | -------------------------- | | Cost to customer | Free — funded by AWS Partner program | $15K–$60K | Engineering time only | | Methodology | AWS Well-Architected Framework (6 pillars) | Varies by vendor | Often ad hoc | | Tooling | AWS Well-Architected Tool (official) | Varies | Spreadsheets / docs | | Funded remediation credits | Up to $5K per qualifying workload | None | None | | Findings vs. AWS roadmap | Mapped to current AWS services | Often vendor-agnostic, generic | Depends on team currency | | Scope | Single workload per review (deep) | Often broader, shallower | Whatever team has time for | | Auditor independence | External AWS-certified architects | External | Internal — bias risk | | Best for | Production workloads on AWS | Multi-cloud or pre-cloud orgs | Early-stage / sandbox | ## What We Assess ### Operational Excellence How well are you running and monitoring your systems? - **Deployment practices** — Are deployments automated through [CI/CD pipelines](/services/devops-pipeline-setup/), or does your team manually deploy to production? - **Runbooks and playbooks** — Do you have documented procedures for common operational tasks and incident response? - **Monitoring and alerting** — Are CloudWatch dashboards, alarms, and automated responses in place for critical metrics? - **Change management** — Are infrastructure changes tracked, reviewed, and reversible? **Common findings:** Manual deployments without rollback capability, missing runbooks for critical systems, CloudWatch alarms that alert but trigger no automated response. ### Security Is your cloud environment protected against threats and compliant with your regulatory requirements? - **Identity and access management** — IAM policies, roles, MFA enforcement, access key rotation, and the principle of least privilege - **Data protection** — Encryption at rest and in transit across all services (S3, EBS, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS, SNS) - **Network security** — VPC architecture, Security Groups, NACLs, public exposure, and VPN/Direct Connect configuration - **Detection and response** — GuardDuty, Security Hub, Config rules, and incident response procedures - **Compliance** — Mapping of controls to SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, or other frameworks **Common findings:** Overprivileged IAM roles with AdministratorAccess, unencrypted S3 buckets and EBS volumes, Security Groups allowing 0.0.0.0/0 access to non-public ports, GuardDuty findings going unreviewed. For organizations needing a deeper security focus, see our [AWS Security Consulting](/services/aws-cloud-security/) services. For compliance-specific requirements (HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI DSS), see our [Cloud Compliance Services](/services/cloud-compliance-services/). ### Reliability Will your systems continue to operate correctly when things go wrong? - **Multi-AZ and multi-Region** — Are critical workloads deployed across Availability Zones? Is cross-Region disaster recovery configured for business-critical systems? - **Autoscaling** — Do compute resources scale automatically to meet demand? - **Backup and recovery** — Are backups automated, encrypted, and regularly tested for restoration? - **Fault isolation** — Do failures in one component cascade to others? - **RPO and RTO** — Are Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives defined, documented, and achievable? **Common findings:** Single-AZ deployments for production databases, no backup restoration testing, autoscaling policies that scale up but never scale down, undefined RPO/RTO targets. ### Performance Efficiency Are you using the right resources for the right workloads? - **Compute selection** — Are instance types matched to workload characteristics (compute-optimized, memory-optimized, Graviton)? - **Database performance** — Are queries optimized, indexes appropriate, and connection pooling in place? - **Caching** — Is caching implemented at appropriate layers (CloudFront, ElastiCache, application-level)? - **Networking** — Are VPC endpoints in use? Is data transfer minimized between AZs and Regions? **Common findings:** Oversized instances running at 10-15% CPU utilization, no caching layer in front of read-heavy databases, missing VPC endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB causing unnecessary NAT Gateway charges. ### Cost Optimization Are you getting the most value from every dollar spent on AWS? - **Resource utilization** — Unused EC2 instances, unattached EBS volumes, idle load balancers, and oversized RDS instances - **Pricing optimization** — Reserved Instance and Savings Plan coverage, Spot Instance usage for fault-tolerant workloads - **Storage efficiency** — S3 lifecycle policies, EBS volume type selection (gp2 vs gp3), unused snapshots - **Data transfer** — Cross-AZ transfer costs, NAT Gateway charges, CloudFront egress optimization **Common findings:** 30-50% of non-production instances running 24/7 when they are only needed during business hours, no RI/SP coverage for steady-state workloads, S3 data accumulating in Standard tier with no lifecycle policies. For in-depth cost optimization, see our [AWS Cloud Cost Optimization Services](/services/aws-cloud-cost-optimization-services/). ### Sustainability Is your architecture environmentally efficient? - **Resource efficiency** — Are resources right-sized to maximize utilization and minimize waste? - **Managed services** — Are you leveraging shared managed services that AWS optimizes for energy efficiency? - **Graviton adoption** — ARM-based Graviton instances deliver better performance per watt than x86 equivalents - **Data lifecycle** — Are data retention policies in place to avoid storing unnecessary data? ## Our Review Process ### Week 1: Discovery and Automated Analysis **Day 1-2: Access and scoping** - Establish read-only cross-account IAM role access to your AWS environment - Conduct discovery interviews with stakeholders (2-3 hours total) - Define scope — which accounts, workloads, and compliance requirements to assess **Day 3-5: Automated assessment** - Run AWS Trusted Advisor checks across all accounts - Execute AWS Config conformance packs for compliance benchmarks (CIS, SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI) - Analyze Cost Explorer data for spending patterns and optimization opportunities - Pull Compute Optimizer recommendations for right-sizing - Review Security Hub findings and GuardDuty alerts - Inventory all resources with utilization metrics ### Week 2: Manual Analysis and Report **Day 6-8: Manual deep dive** - Review architectural diagrams and data flow patterns - Evaluate IAM policies, roles, and permission boundaries - Assess VPC architecture, routing, and network security - Analyze database configurations, backup policies, and replication - Review container and serverless workload configurations - Validate disaster recovery and backup restoration procedures **Day 9-10: Report and presentation** - Compile findings into a prioritized remediation roadmap - Categorize each finding as Critical, High, Medium, or Low risk - Estimate remediation effort and business impact for each finding - Present findings to your team with Q&A ## What You Receive ### Executive Summary A 2-page overview for leadership with: - Overall architecture health score across all six pillars - Top 5 critical risks requiring immediate attention - Estimated cost savings from optimization recommendations - AWS credit eligibility from the Well-Architected Review ### Detailed Findings Report A comprehensive technical document with: - Every finding categorized by pillar and severity - Specific remediation steps for each finding - AWS service recommendations and configuration guidance - Compliance gap analysis mapped to your target frameworks ### Remediation Roadmap A prioritized action plan organized into: - **Quick wins** (1-2 days) — Changes that deliver immediate value with minimal risk - **Short-term improvements** (1-4 weeks) — Important fixes that require testing and validation - **Strategic initiatives** (1-3 months) — Architectural changes that require planning and phased implementation ### AWS Well-Architected Tool Report Official report generated through the AWS Well-Architected Tool that: - Documents your review in your AWS account for ongoing tracking - May qualify you for AWS credits to fund remediation - Provides a baseline for future reviews to measure improvement ## When to Get an Architecture Review - **Pre-launch** — Validate that your architecture is production-ready before a major launch or migration - **Post-migration** — After [migrating to AWS](/services/aws-migration/), ensure workloads are properly optimized for the cloud - **Before compliance audits** — Identify and remediate gaps before SOC 2, HIPAA, or PCI DSS audits - **When costs are rising** — Unexplained cost increases often indicate architectural inefficiencies. See our [Cost Explorer guide](/blog/aws-cost-explorer-budgets-monitoring-guide/) for monitoring setup. - **After significant growth** — Architectures that work at 1x scale may have reliability and performance issues at 10x - **Annually** — Even stable environments benefit from regular reviews as AWS releases new services and best practices evolve ## Getting Started An AWS Well-Architected Review is a low-risk, high-impact engagement. In 2 weeks, you receive a clear picture of your cloud health with a prioritized plan for improvement — plus potential AWS credits to fund the work. Pair the Well-Architected Review with our [FinOps Consulting](/services/finops-consulting/) for ongoing cost governance, our [AWS Security Consulting](/services/aws-cloud-security/) for deep security remediation, or our [AWS Managed Services](/services/aws-managed-services/) for continuous operational oversight after the review. [Book Your Free Well-Architected Review →](/contact-us/)
An AWS Well-Architected Review is a structured assessment of a cloud environment against the AWS Well-Architected Framework — six pillars covering Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. The review identifies high-risk findings, scores each pillar, and produces a prioritized remediation roadmap. AWS Partners deliver the review using AWS’s own Well-Architected Tool, with funding credits available for qualifying remediations.
Cloud environments evolve organically. Teams add resources, deploy new services, and make incremental changes over months and years. Without periodic review, this organic growth leads to architectural drift — security gaps widen, costs creep upward, and reliability risks accumulate silently until they surface as outages or audit failures.
An architecture review provides a structured, objective assessment of your entire AWS environment. It answers the question every CTO and VP of Engineering needs answered: Is our cloud architecture supporting our business, or is it holding us back?
At FactualMinds, we conduct architecture reviews using the AWS Well-Architected Framework — a proven methodology that evaluates your environment across six critical dimensions. As an AWS Select Tier Consulting Partner, our reviews qualify for AWS credits to fund remediation of identified issues.
| Dimension | AWS Well-Architected Review (Partner-led) | Generic third-party audit | DIY internal review |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost to customer | Free — funded by AWS Partner program | $15K–$60K | Engineering time only |
| Methodology | AWS Well-Architected Framework (6 pillars) | Varies by vendor | Often ad hoc |
| Tooling | AWS Well-Architected Tool (official) | Varies | Spreadsheets / docs |
| Funded remediation credits | Up to $5K per qualifying workload | None | None |
| Findings vs. AWS roadmap | Mapped to current AWS services | Often vendor-agnostic, generic | Depends on team currency |
| Scope | Single workload per review (deep) | Often broader, shallower | Whatever team has time for |
| Auditor independence | External AWS-certified architects | External | Internal — bias risk |
| Best for | Production workloads on AWS | Multi-cloud or pre-cloud orgs | Early-stage / sandbox |
How well are you running and monitoring your systems?
Common findings: Manual deployments without rollback capability, missing runbooks for critical systems, CloudWatch alarms that alert but trigger no automated response.
Is your cloud environment protected against threats and compliant with your regulatory requirements?
Common findings: Overprivileged IAM roles with AdministratorAccess, unencrypted S3 buckets and EBS volumes, Security Groups allowing 0.0.0.0/0 access to non-public ports, GuardDuty findings going unreviewed.
For organizations needing a deeper security focus, see our AWS Security Consulting services. For compliance-specific requirements (HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI DSS), see our Cloud Compliance Services.
Will your systems continue to operate correctly when things go wrong?
Common findings: Single-AZ deployments for production databases, no backup restoration testing, autoscaling policies that scale up but never scale down, undefined RPO/RTO targets.
Are you using the right resources for the right workloads?
Common findings: Oversized instances running at 10-15% CPU utilization, no caching layer in front of read-heavy databases, missing VPC endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB causing unnecessary NAT Gateway charges.
Are you getting the most value from every dollar spent on AWS?
Common findings: 30-50% of non-production instances running 24/7 when they are only needed during business hours, no RI/SP coverage for steady-state workloads, S3 data accumulating in Standard tier with no lifecycle policies.
For in-depth cost optimization, see our AWS Cloud Cost Optimization Services.
Is your architecture environmentally efficient?
Day 1-2: Access and scoping
Day 3-5: Automated assessment
Day 6-8: Manual deep dive
Day 9-10: Report and presentation
A 2-page overview for leadership with:
A comprehensive technical document with:
A prioritized action plan organized into:
Official report generated through the AWS Well-Architected Tool that:
An AWS Well-Architected Review is a low-risk, high-impact engagement. In 2 weeks, you receive a clear picture of your cloud health with a prioritized plan for improvement — plus potential AWS credits to fund the work.
Pair the Well-Architected Review with our FinOps Consulting for ongoing cost governance, our AWS Security Consulting for deep security remediation, or our AWS Managed Services for continuous operational oversight after the review.
Structured assessment against all 6 pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, cost optimization, and sustainability — plus the new Responsible AI Lens (Nov 2025), the updated Machine Learning Lens (now six pillars including Sustainability), and the updated Generative AI Lens (eight architecture scenarios including agentic AI). The right lens for your workload, not a generic checklist.
IAM analysis, encryption review, network assessment, and compliance mapping to SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001.
Right-sizing recommendations, RI/SP strategy, storage optimization, and data transfer cost reduction.
Multi-AZ architecture validation, disaster recovery evaluation, backup testing, and failover planning.
Compute, database, and networking performance analysis with optimization recommendations.
Prioritized action plan with estimated effort, impact, and timeline for each recommendation.
Official AWS partnership with validated expertise and access to MAP credits for remediation.
Every finding includes specific remediation steps, not generic best practices. We fix what we find.
Comprehensive assessment delivered in 2 weeks with prioritized findings and quick wins.
Our team covers security, networking, databases, containers, serverless, and cost optimization — one team, complete coverage.
Verticalized engagements aligned to industry threat models, compliance, and reference architectures.
Implementation guides for this service from our team of AWS experts.
CAF 3.0 organizes six perspectives and 47 capabilities—up from 31 in CAF 2.0—plus four phases (Envision, Align, Launch, Scale). Here is how to connect those workshops to Control Tower, MAP, and Well-Architected without treating the framework as a slide deck.
A CCoE that only publishes standards decks fails within two quarters. This 2026 operating model ties platform RFCs, delegated-admin guardrails, Well-Architected reviews, and FinOps chargeback—benchmarked on a 14-account estate that cut deploy exceptions from 23/month to 6 in 90 days.
A single AWS account is fine for week one. By month six, audit teams, security reviewers, and your CFO will all want their own boundary. How to structure AWS Organizations with Control Tower and a landing zone that doesn't have to be re-architected at scale.
Global Accelerator charges about $0.025 per provisioned accelerator per hour—even while disabled—and adds Data Transfer-Premium on top of normal data transfer. Two static Anycast IPv4 addresses (or four addresses in dual-stack: two IPv4 and two IPv6) front ALBs, NLBs, EC2, or EIPs across Regions; that pricing model changes whether you beat CloudFront or Route 53 latency records alone.
Your landing zone set up the org, OUs, and baseline SCPs — then most teams stall, duplicating resources per account and wiring brittle cross-account role chains. Since re:Invent 2024 the toolkit changed: RCPs bound what can be done TO a resource (even by external principals), declarative policies enforce EC2/VPC/EBS config state that survives new APIs, and one Route 53 Profile can push DNS to up to 5,000 VPCs. Here is the mechanism-by-job decision matrix and a rollout order that avoids lockouts.
AWS Prescriptive Guidance says Argo CD and Flux both handle most GitOps scenarios capably — so picking one is a fit decision, not a winner. The decisions that actually cause incidents are the ones underneath: plaintext secrets in the GitOps repo, CI running kubectl apply and reintroducing drift, no App-of-Apps so onboarding is click-ops, and repo topology you can't change later. Here is the Argo CD vs Flux matrix, an App-of-Apps example, and the five traps independent of tool.
The reflex to bolt Amazon Managed Prometheus + Grafana onto every workload is how observability bills quietly double. CloudWatch Application Signals now gives you an auto-discovered service map, SLOs, and traces with near-zero setup; AMP only earns its keep when you are PromQL-native or drowning in high-cardinality metrics — where ingestion (not retention) is the cost driver. Here is the decision matrix, an ADOT dual-export config, and the three levers that actually cut the AMP bill.
Running one AWS FIS experiment in a demo account is not chaos engineering — it is a screenshot. A program ties experiments to SLOs, scopes blast radius with tags, halts on CloudWatch alarm stop conditions, schedules via EventBridge, and closes the loop by re-testing the fix. FIS now ships AZ Power Interruption and cross-Region connectivity scenarios in its Scenario Library. Here is the L0→L3 maturity matrix, a GameDay runbook, and a stop-condition-wired experiment skeleton.
A curated, production-tested guide to microservices patterns on AWS — what to use, what to skip, and what changed in 2026 (App Mesh EOL, VPC Lattice, Powertools idempotency, Step Functions sagas).
SQS, MSK Kafka, and Redis queues are not interchangeable. Each has different cost models, ordering guarantees, and failure modes. This guide covers when to use each, how to autoscale workers on queue depth, and how to build idempotent consumers.
Systems fundamentals connected to AWS architecture decisions — from our learning paths library.
CAP is not a trivia question—it is the reason your global DynamoDB table shows stale inventory or why Aurora Global reads lag 80 ms behind the writer. This guide maps partition tolerance, consistency, and availability trade-offs to concrete AWS controls.
Packet loss on mobile networks still punishes HTTP/1.1 head-of-line blocking—but HTTP/3 only helps if CloudFront terminates QUIC and your origin connection pools are sized for multiplexed streams. This guide connects Reno, Cubic, BBR, HPACK, and QUIC to ALB and CloudFront decisions.
Cache-aside without an invalidation story ships stale pricing to 2% of users—the hardest 2% to debug. This guide layers CloudFront, ElastiCache, and DAX with TTL, event-driven purge, and when write-through beats cache-aside.
Exactly-once is a myth end-to-end—but idempotent consumers plus event stores get you close. CQRS read models on DynamoDB streams, Kinesis, and EventBridge replay semantics.
Token buckets allow bursts; leaky buckets smooth traffic—WAF rate rules and API Gateway usage plans implement neither perfectly but both matter for layered defense.
You rarely implement Raft on EC2—you buy it in Aurora, DynamoDB, and EKS etcd. This guide explains quorum math so you trust managed services and avoid rolling your own coordinator.
Third-party tools we frequently wire into AWS as part of this engagement — production-tested integration guides for each.
Terraform + AWS in 2026: Stacks GA, ephemeral values, provider-defined functions, Test Framework, OpenTofu 1.8 encryption — vs CDK and CloudFormation.
Amazon EKS in 2026: Auto Mode GA, Hybrid Nodes, Karpenter 1.0, Pod Identity, Graviton-first node pools, and ECR enhanced scanning — cheaper, safer K8s.
Architecture patterns, decision trees, and glossary terms that map to this engagement.
AWS architectural best practices framework covering six pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.
Framework defining what security and compliance tasks AWS manages versus what customers must manage.
In-depth comparisons to help you choose the right approach before engaging.
Objective comparison of AWS vs Microsoft Azure for enterprise workloads. Features, pricing, compliance, and strategic fit.
Compare AWS consulting services, costs, speed, and specialization between FactualMinds and Big 4 consulting firms.
Talk to our AWS experts about how we can help transform your business.
