Using custom lenses for AWS Well-Architected reviews

The Amazon Well-Architected Framework is a set of six pillars that help to build secure, high-performing and efficient infrastructure. These six pillars are operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization and sustainability. The AWS Well-Architected Tool helps to evaluate workloads against these architectural best practices. Using the tool is free of charge.

The standard AWS Well-Architected Framework set of questions works for most workloads, but others can benefit from being reviewed with a more specific one or a “lens.” AWS has released many lenses, such as the Container Build and Machine Learning lenses. However, these lenses are only available as white papers.

The easiest and most pleasant way to perform a Well-Architected review is with the Well-Architected Tool. It is easy to use for both technical and non-technical users, provides structure to the review, and generates a detailed report with improvement plans. How can a custom lens be used in the tool, then?

The Well-Architected Tool supports creating custom lenses with your own questions, best practices and improvement plans. Creating a lens requires crafting a JSON file according to the Lens formation specification. The lens can then be imported to the Well-Architected Tool and applied to a workload. The tool also allows creating new lenses as drafts and previewing changes made to them.

Solita has published the Container Build Lens as a custom lens. The lens conforms to the equivalent AWS white paper.  Use this lens to build secure, efficient, high-performing and reliable container workloads!