AWS Well-Architected glossary

The primary entity that defines the scope, goals, and cross-account configuration for recommendation generation. A profile specifies which AWS accounts to analyze, which AWS Regions to scan, which optimization pillars to focus on, and what business goals to prioritize. Each profile is scoped to a single AWS account and AWS Region.

The output of the AWS Well-Architected Agent analysis system. Each recommendation contains a title, description, impact assessment, trade-offs, guided actions, and remediation steps. A recommendation has a lifecycle with three states: active, completed, and suppressed.

The scope level of a recommendation. AWS Well-Architected Agent generates three types: Resource (targets a specific AWS resource), Application (spans multiple related resources within a discovered application), and Architecture (generated from IaC template analysis).

An optimization dimension that AWS Well-Architected Agent analyzes. The available pillars are: Cost optimization, Security, Resilience, and Performance.

A natural language business objective associated with a pillar. Goals drive recommendation prioritization and ranking. Each goal consists of a goal statement and a target pillar. For best results, goals should be specific, measurable, and time-bound.

An AWS Identity and Access Management role in the profile account that AWS Well-Architected Agent assumes to orchestrate resource discovery across your configured accounts. The execution role must trust the wellarchitected.amazonaws.com service principal and have permission to assume access roles in target accounts.

An IAM role deployed in each target AWS account that you want AWS Well-Architected Agent to analyze. The access role grants AWS Well-Architected Agent read-only permissions to discover and analyze resources in that account.

The process of producing recommendations. Generation can be proactive (running automatically on a recurring schedule) or on-demand (triggered by you, such as for architecture reviews).

A saved filter configuration that controls which recommendations appear when listing. Views filter by pillar, service, goal, account, and region. Views are sharable across users in the same AWS account and do not affect which recommendations are generated.

Additional customer-provided data that informs recommendation generation. Context can include IaC templates, custom best practices (uploaded as CSV), and other supplemental information.

Actionable steps to implement a recommendation. Remediation can be SSM Runbook automation (for recommendations derived from AWS Trusted Advisor checks) or guided actions (AI-generated step-by-step instructions for console, AWS CLI, SDK, or IaC implementation).

A collection of business-context questions and answers that you attach to workloads. Profiles prioritize the review questions and improvement plan risks that are most relevant to your business. AWS WA Tool profiles are unrelated to AWS WA Agent profiles.

A set of components that deliver business value. The workload is usually the level of detail that business and technology leaders communicate about. Examples include marketing websites, ecommerce websites, the backend for a mobile app, and analytic platforms. Workloads vary in architectural complexity from a static website to microservices architectures with multiple data stores.

A marker for key changes in your architecture as it evolves throughout the product lifecycle: design, testing, go live, and production.

A way for you to consistently measure your architectures against best practices and identify areas for improvement. In addition to the lenses provided by AWS, you can create and use your own lenses, or use lenses that have been shared with you.

An architectural or operational choice that AWS has found might result in significant negative impact to a business. HRIs might affect organizational operations, assets, and individuals.

An architectural or operational choice that AWS has found might negatively impact business, but to a lesser extent than HRIs.

For additional information, see High Risk Issues (HRIs) and Medium Risk Issues (MRIs).