Not an audit. A structured conversation.
AWS's own review process, published.
The AWS Well-Architected Framework is AWS's internal review process, published — in AWS's own words.
AWS's own tooling grades what comes out — High Risk Issues (HRIs) and Medium Risk Issues — against one scoped workload.
source: AWS Well-Architected Framework — On architecture
$ ./show --provenance
AWS's own account of where the question set comes from: best practices "emerge from our experience running thousands of systems at internet scale", set from data and from principal engineers, then "formalized into our internal review processes, and also into mechanisms that enforce compliance". Whenever something significant goes wrong — an internal system, an AWS service, a customer — AWS says it revisits the root cause analysis "to see if we could improve the review processes we use". So the list is not a checklist someone drafted. It is a record of failures that have already been paid for by somebody.
Slower to ship. No fewer failures.
No evidence found is not the same as proof of no effect — but it is what the largest running study of software delivery reports. Which is the same reason AWS writes its own review as a conversation and not an audit.
source: DORA — Capabilities: Streamlining change approval
$ ./show --dora-alternative
What DORA recommends in its place is "peer review to meet the goal of segregation of duties, with reviews, comments, and approvals captured in the team's development platform as part of the development process" — which is the shape this engagement already takes. Findings arrive as pull requests in your repositories, reviewed and merged by your engineers, on your platform, with the discussion attached. A review is where a risk gets named. Your own change process is where it gets closed, and it stays yours afterwards.
Six pillars — and what breaks without each one.
These are engineering consequences, not predictions about your business.
Reviews are widely available. So what is the money for?
AWS has the data. AWS says "we believe".
The framework is public, the AWS Well-Architected Tool is free to use — and after reviewing, in its own words, "thousands of customers' architectures", the strongest outcome claim AWS publishes is a sentence of belief: "We believe that having well-architected systems greatly increases the likelihood of business success." If anyone quotes you a percentage that a Well-Architected review will improve, ask where the number came from; we do not have one either, and the price here is not for the list.
source: AWS Well-Architected Framework — Introduction
$ ./show --what-it-buys
You can run the question set yourself in the free tool, and you should — the findings report is the cheap half of this. What the number buys is the engineering underneath each finding: the IAM to re-scope, the network to segment, the restore to actually perform, the pipeline to rebuild so the fix cannot regress. Where that engineering is larger than a quick win it gets scoped and quoted separately rather than promised here. The ledger below is the whole of it, both columns.
You leave with a written spek — what your roadmap is blocked on, a fixed scope, and a timeline for your estate. Yours whether or not you use us.
This is block 02 of seven — see the full set of accelerators for what else can be sequenced around it.