Every day we assist customers in architecting systems to take advantage of best practices in the cloud. We work with you on making architectural trade-offs as your designs evolve. As you deploy these systems into live environments, we learn how well these systems perform and the consequences of those trade-offs.

The Well-Architected Framework provides a consistent set of best practices for customers and partners to evaluate architectures and provides a set of questions you can use to evaluate how well architecture is aligned to AWS best practices. The Well-Architected Framework is based on five pillars operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.

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When architecting solutions you make trade-offs between pillars based upon your business context. These business decisions can drive your engineering priorities. You might optimize to reduce cost at the expense of reliability in development environments, or, for mission-critical solutions, you might optimize reliability with increased costs. In e-commerce solutions, performance can affect revenue and customer propensity to buy. Security and operational excellence are generally not traded-off against the other pillars.