What it covers
The six pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimisation and sustainability. In practice that means one structured pass over how you deploy, how you'd survive a failure, where the money goes, and whether the whole thing can grow without a rewrite.
Why get one
- Before you scale: cheaper to fix the architecture before traffic finds the weak points
- After an incident: turn the post-mortem into a systematic check, not a patch
- When investors or enterprise customers start asking pointed questions about your platform
How mine differs from the tool
AWS's console tool will happily generate a hundred findings of equal apparent urgency. That's noise. I run the review as a working session with your team, then hand back a short list ranked by what would actually hurt you, each with a cost and effort estimate. Findings you can act on, not a PDF you file.