Customers have been building their innovations on AWS for over 11 years. During that time, our solutions architects have conducted tens of thousands of architecture reviews for our customers. In 2012 we created the “Well-Architected” initiative to share with you best practices for building in the cloud, and started publishing them in 2015. We recently released an updated Framework whitepaper, and a new Operational Excellence Pillar whitepaper to reflect what we learned from working with customers every day. Today, we are pleased to announce a new concept called a “lens” that allows you to focus on specific workload types from the well-architected perspective.

A well-architected review looks at a workload from a general technology perspective, which means it can’t provide workload-specific advice. For example, there are additional best practices when you are building high-performance computing (HPC) or serverless applications. Therefore, we created the concept of a lens to focus on what is different for those types of workloads.

In each lens, we document common scenarios we see — specific to that workload — providing reference architectures and a walkthrough. The lens also provides design principles to help you understand how to architect these types of workloads for the cloud, and questions for assessing your own architecture.

Today, we are releasing two lenses:

Well-Architected: High-Performance Computing (HPC) Lens <new>

Well-Architected: Serverless Applications Lens <new>

We expect to create more lenses over time, and evolve them based on customer feedback.