Karl Robinson
February 4, 2026
Karl is CEO and Co-Founder of Logicata – he’s an AWS Community Builder in the Cloud Operations category, and AWS Certified to Solutions Architect Professional level. Knowledgeable, informal, and approachable, Karl has founded, grown, and sold internet and cloud-hosting companies.
An AWS Well-Architected Framework review assesses your AWS workloads against AWS best practices across security, reliability, performance efficiency and cost optimisation. It helps teams identify architectural risk and cost inefficiencies at an early stage, including design gaps that affect day-to-day operations. Teams can use these findings to prioritise corrective work, regain control of cloud spend and reduce avoidable operational disruption.
As AWS environments grow, architectural decisions accumulate over time and spread across multiple teams. Costs become harder to forecast as environments expand. Security controls lose consistency when access models evolve without clear ownership. Teams also find performance issues harder to diagnose. These conditions often prompt teams to commission an AWS architecture assessment.
This is the type of assessment Logicata delivers through its AWS Well-Architected Framework review service, typically engaged once teams recognise that architectural drift is starting to affect cost control, reliability or governance.
What is an AWS Well-Architected Framework review?
An AWS Well-Architected Framework review is a formal assessment of AWS workloads against AWS-defined architectural best practices, focused on how systems are actually configured and operated.
The review takes place inside your AWS account using AWS tooling and examines how workloads align with the six AWS Well-Architected pillars. As a result, teams receive a clear set of risks, improvement opportunities and prioritised recommendations drawn from real configuration and usage data, giving them a basis for deciding what to fix first and what can wait.
The review sits outside generic cloud audits and enterprise-managed services. Teams often work with an AWS partner to deliver the review and produce a practical roadmap for improving AWS architecture.
What are the six AWS Well-Architected pillars and why do they matter?
Every review evaluates workloads against six pillars and targets specific, commonly observed operational risks.
- Operational Excellence
How effectively workloads are monitored, operated and improved over time. - Security
Identity management, data protection, detection controls and incident response readiness. - Reliability
The ability of systems to recover from failures and adapt to demand changes. - Performance Efficiency
Using the right AWS services and resource types to meet workload requirements efficiently. - Cost Optimisation
Avoiding unnecessary spend while maintaining performance and resilience. - Sustainability
Reducing resource waste and improving long-term efficiency.
An AWS environment should address all six pillars. Gaps in one area commonly affect others.
If you want to discuss whether an AWS Well-Architected Framework review is the right next step for your environment, you can book a conversation with a Logicata AWS expert to talk through your current architecture and priorities.
Why do businesses run an AWS Well-Architected Framework review?
Most organisations do not intentionally design poor cloud architectures. Issues usually develop when teams scale, responsibilities change or systems evolve beyond their original design assumptions.
Teams usually run this type of architecture review to:
- Identify architectural risk before it leads to outages or data exposure
- Bring predictability back to AWS costs
- Validate security controls as environments become more complex
- Improve reliability for customer-facing or revenue-critical systems
- Support compliance, audit and customer assurance requirements
For leadership teams, the review supports more informed decision-making. For technical teams, it provides a prioritised improvement plan.
What problems does an AWS architecture review typically uncover?
A structured AWS architecture review often uncovers issues that day-to-day operations miss, particularly in environments that have grown organically:
- Over-provisioned resources increasing monthly AWS spend
- IAM structures that lack clear ownership or least-privilege control
- Missing or inconsistent monitoring and alerting, often noticed only after incidents or customer impact
- Backup and recovery processes that exist but are rarely tested
- Architectural decisions that do not scale with traffic or data growth
The review helps teams spot architectural risk early enough to address it before it leads to operational issues.
At this stage, teams often decide to involve an AWS partner to run the review and translate findings into concrete next steps, rather than waiting for cost, security or availability issues to surface in production.
What happens during an AWS Well-Architected Framework review?
A typical review follows a defined, repeatable process that evaluates design decisions against current operational use:
- Discovery and scope definition
Understanding business objectives, workloads and priorities. - In-account workload assessment
Reviewing configurations directly within the AWS environment. - Pillar-by-pillar analysis
Evaluating each workload against AWS framework questions. - Risk identification and prioritisation
Highlighting high-risk areas and improvement opportunities. - Findings report and action plan
Delivering a structured set of recommendations ranked by impact and effort.
The review produces a practical roadmap that teams can act on immediately, helping them focus effort on changes that deliver the most operational benefit.
What are the benefits of an AWS Well-Architected Framework review for growing teams?
After completing the review, businesses gain outcomes that support day-to-day decision-making:
- Visibility into architectural risk and technical debt
- More predictable control over AWS costs
- Improved workload reliability
- Fewer avoidable alerts and operational interruptions
- Confidence that AWS environments align with recognised best practice
Many organisations use the review as a baseline, repeating it periodically to reassess priorities as workloads evolve.
Who should run an AWS Well-Architected Framework review?
The review is particularly valuable for organisations where AWS usage has become difficult to oversee:
- Businesses with growing or unpredictable AWS spend
- SaaS or platform companies reliant on uptime and performance
- Teams without dedicated cloud operations ownership
- Organisations preparing for compliance, security or customer audits
- Companies planning to scale workloads or launch new services
In each case, the review helps decision-makers identify risk, set priorities and avoid reactive decision-making.
How an AWS Well-Architected Framework review can unlock funding and external validation
An AWS Well-Architected Framework review can also unlock AWS funding to support remediation work. Where high-risk findings are identified, organisations may qualify for AWS credits or co-funding programmes to help implement recommended improvements, particularly those linked to security, reliability or cost optimisation. This can reduce the cost of corrective action and accelerate architectural improvement.
The review also provides external validation that your workloads align with recognised AWS best practice. That independent confirmation can support compliance and audit preparation, strengthen customer assurance conversations, and add credibility in investor or due diligence scenarios, demonstrating that your cloud architecture is structured, governed and benchmarked against industry standards.
How Logicata delivers AWS Well-Architected Framework reviews
When teams decide to run an AWS Well-Architected Framework review, they often work with a certified partner. Logicata delivers these reviews directly within the customer’s AWS account.
Experienced engineers lead the reviews and deliver prioritised recommendations based on real-world usage, with practical guidance tied to business impact. Reviews often sit alongside Logicata’s InfrAssure AWS managed services, where teams want ongoing visibility rather than a one-off assessment. Logicata can also support teams as they implement improvements.
For organisations that want ongoing assurance, the review can sit alongside managed AWS services, ensuring architectures remain aligned with best practice as environments change.
When should you run an AWS architecture review?
Teams often find the review useful:
- Before scaling workloads or launching new products
- After migrating systems into AWS
- When AWS bills become difficult to explain
- Ahead of compliance or security assessments
- When operational ownership feels unclear
In each scenario, the review helps clarify ownership and reduce the likelihood of future operational risk.
Turn AWS architecture insight into practical next steps
An AWS Well-Architected Framework review shows teams how they currently structure and operate their AWS environment, often highlighting issues that are easier to address early than after further growth or platform change.
Logicata delivers this review for organisations that want an independent, practical assessment before cost, complexity or compliance pressures increase.
If you want confidence in how your architecture supports scale, cost control and operational risk management, this review provides a practical starting point. To explore how this applies to your AWS environment, you can book time with a Logicata AWS expert and discuss your current setup, risks and priorities.
