Skip to content

Running a Well-Architected Review & Next Steps

A Well-Architected review is a structured conversation about a specific workload, not a one-off compliance exercise. It works best as a recurring practice.

Suggested process

  1. Scope the review to a single workload or system with a clear owner.
  2. Work through each pillar’s checklist with the people who actually operate the workload.
  3. Flag every “no” or “unsure” answer as a candidate finding. Don’t pre-filter.
  4. Prioritize findings by risk and effort. Not everything needs to be fixed immediately.
  5. Record findings and improvement actions in your normal backlog, with owners and target dates.
  6. Re-run the review after major architecture changes, and at least quarterly for production workloads.

Cadence

For new workloads, run a lightweight review before going live, focused on Security and Reliability.

For production workloads, conduct a full review on a quarterly basis, and after any major change (new region, new compliance requirement, significant scale change).

For regulated workloads, align your review cadence with your compliance/audit calendar (e.g., ahead of NIS2 or DORA-related assessments).

Getting help

Cleura’s architects and consultants can facilitate a Well-Architected review directly, particularly useful for compliance-sensitive workloads, migrations, or when validating a new architecture before launch.

Quick Reference: Pillars and Cleura Cloud Capabilities

Pillar Relevant Cleura Cloud capability
Operational Excellence CCMP, CLI & API, Infrastructure-as-Code, projects & quotas, Gardener CI-CD integration, Managed Services
Security & Digital Sovereignty Compliant Cloud, security groups, project isolation, EU-only regions, ISO 27001 / MSB Protection Class 3 facilities, VPN connectivity
Reliability Availability zones, Load Balancer + auto-scaling, automated daily snapshots (10-day retention), multi-region DR, Managed Database/Kubernetes HA
Performance Efficiency VM flavor profiles (Generic / Low Latency Disk / High Intensity CPU), block & object storage tiers, regional placement, Gardener worker pools
Cost Optimization Per-second billing, storage lifecycle policies, project quotas, transparent pricing & volume discounts, Managed Services trade-off

Next Steps

  1. Pick one production workload and run it through the five checklists in this document.
  2. Log every gap found as a backlog item, prioritized by risk.
  3. Confirm the workload’s deployment model was chosen deliberately based on its regulatory, security, and availability requirements. Do not choose by default.
  4. Schedule the next review. Quarterly is a reasonable default for production workloads.