Well-Architected Review
A structured self-assessment of a workload against defined pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, cost, and sustainability.
The providers each publish a version, and their real value is not the branding but the checklist effect: a systematic pass across dimensions that a design review conducted from memory will partially skip. Cost and operational readiness are the two most commonly skipped, and they are the two that hurt later.
It works best applied per workload rather than per estate, early enough to change the design, and with the output being a small number of prioritised, owned remediation items rather than a score.
Two cautions. The questions are provider-shaped, so some answers will point at that provider's services when a different answer was available. And a review is a snapshot: repeat it at significant change points, since a workload drifts away from its own design within a year of launch.