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The AWS Well-Architected Review, in ten business days.
A structured assessment of your AWS estate across the six pillars, delivered by certified engineers. You keep the report and the remediation plan regardless of what you decide next.
Why we give it away
It is the most honest sales process we have found. You see how we work, on your real estate, before any money changes hands. About a third of reviews end with the customer doing the work themselves — that is a fine outcome and we do not chase it.
Six pillars, assessed against your actual configuration
Not a questionnaire. We read your accounts, look at the resources, and talk to the people who operate them.
Operational excellence
Runbooks, deployment safety, observability, incident process and whether operational knowledge exists outside two people's heads.
Security
Identity model, guardrails, detection coverage, encryption, network exposure and how quickly you could evidence a control to an auditor.
Reliability
Redundancy, backup and restore reality, failure modes, dependency fragility, and whether your recovery targets are agreed or assumed.
Performance efficiency
Service and instance selection, scaling behaviour, data access patterns, and where a different architecture would cost less to run faster.
Cost optimisation
Attribution, rightsizing, commitment coverage, storage tiering, data transfer and observability spend — modelled with projected savings.
Sustainability
Utilisation efficiency and region choice. Usually the shortest section, and we will not inflate it to fill a page.
Exactly what happens, and when
Total time commitment from your team is roughly six to eight hours across the fortnight.
- Day 1
Kickoff — 90 minutes
Scope agreed: which accounts, which workloads, what you are worried about. We identify who we need to speak with.
- Days 2–6
Discovery
Read-only access to the accounts in scope. Automated collection plus interviews across the six pillars — typically three to four conversations of an hour each.
- Days 7–9
Analysis
Findings rated high, medium or low, each with an effort estimate, a risk statement and a cost impact where one applies.
- Day 10
Readout
Two sessions: a technical walkthrough with your engineers, and a shorter one for executives. Report delivered the same day.
What lands in your inbox on day ten
- Written report across the six Well-Architected pillars, with findings evidenced against your actual configuration
- Prioritised remediation backlog — effort-sized, risk-rated, in the order we would do them
- Current-state architecture diagrams, which many customers tell us are worth the exercise on their own
- Cost optimisation model with projected savings by lever and a realistic timeline
- Executive summary written to go straight into a board pack without translation
No strings
The report is yours. Use it to brief your own team, to scope a tender, or to hire someone else. We do not watermark it, restrict it, or require an NDA that stops you sharing it internally.
Eligibility
- Australian organisation, or Australian operations of an international one
- Production workloads on AWS, or a committed migration plan
- Able to provide read-only access to the accounts in scope
- Someone who can speak to how the workloads are operated
Very large or highly fragmented estates may need a scoped paid engagement instead. We will tell you at kickoff, not at invoice time.
What we need from you
- A read-only cross-account IAM role (we provide the template)
- Cost and Usage Report or Cost Explorer read access
- 90 minutes for kickoff, ~4 hours of interviews, 2 hours for readout
No agents installed, no write access, no production changes. Everything we do appears in your own CloudTrail.
Review questions
Is it really free?
Yes, for estates that meet the eligibility above. There is no catch and no obligation to proceed. If your estate is large enough that the review needs more than the standard effort, we say so before we start and quote it — we do not begin free and invoice later.
Will you find problems just to sell us work?
Every finding is evidenced against your configuration, so you can verify it yourself or have someone else check it. If your estate is in good shape, the report will be short and will say so. A padded report is easy to spot and would cost us more in reputation than it would earn in work.
Can our incumbent provider be involved?
Yes, and it is usually better if they are. We are assessing the estate, not auditing a supplier. We will share findings with whoever you nominate.
How is this different from the AWS-run review?
It uses the same framework. The difference is that we spend ten days in your accounts rather than running a workshop, and the output includes a costed, sequenced remediation plan rather than a findings list. Your AWS account team can also run one — ask them, and compare.
What if we want to act on the findings ourselves?
Then do. The backlog is written to be executable by an internal team, with enough detail to scope the work. Roughly a third of our reviews end this way and we consider it a good outcome.
Book the review
Tell us roughly what you run and we will confirm eligibility and a start date within one business day.