The well-architected framework is designed to enable architects, developers, and users of AWS to build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications. It's composed of five pillars to ensure a consistent approach to reviewing and designing of architectures. The first pillar is operational excellence and focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business value and with that, continually improving processes and procedures. For example, automating changes with deployment pipelines or responding to events that are triggered. Second is security. As you know, security is priority number one at AWS. This exemplifies it by checking integrity of data and, for example, protecting systems by using encryption. Third is reliability, and it focuses on recovery planning, such as recovery from an Amazon DynamoDB disruption or EC2 node failure to how you handle change to meet business and customer demand. Fourth is performance efficiency and it entails using IT and computing resources efficiently, for example, using the right Amazon EC2 type based on workload and memory requirements to making informed decisions to maintain efficiency as business needs evolve. Lastly, we have cost optimization, which looks at optimizing full cost. This is controlling where money is spent and, for example, checking if you have overestimated your EC2 server side, you could then lower cost by choosing a more cost-effective size. In the past, you need to evaluate these against your AWS infrastructure with the help of a solutions architect. Not that you can't and aren't still encouraged to do that but we listened to customer feedback and decided to release the framework as a self-service tool, the well-architected tool. You can access it via the AWS management console, create a workload and ran it against your AWS account to generate a report showing areas that should be addressed. It looks like a traffic light system with green being, "Okay, captain, keep up the good work." Orange being, you should probably look into this because there's room for improvement. Red being, you should look at this because something is at risk. These are areas where the tool has detected potential issues, and it presents you with a plan on how to architect using established best practices. It should be noted that you can always override these settings if the questions don't apply to your scenario. It's very customizable. Interesting side note, where I'm from, South Africa, we call traffic lights robots. If we take a look at the tool itself, you'll see something similar to the following screenshot. As I mentioned, we name our workload and that appears in section 1. Section 2 shows you the pillars and drop-downs into the questions for each. Section 3 shows the actual questions themselves. Four is the pillar and questions stem. Five is a bit of background and the recommendation. Six is the answer you provide with a toggle to designate whether the question is applicable or not. This is important as it affects your overall score. I can't forget section 7 where you'll be presented with short videos explaining how to answer a particular question. Anyhow, that's the well-architected framework and tool. Hope you've enjoyed learning how to evaluate your workloads.