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A useful architecture review asks whether a design fits its workload, exposes consequential risks, and gives the team evidence for its choices. Use these 41 questions as a structured conversation—not a pass/fail exam or universal scorecard. For every material answer, identify the requirement, evidence, owner, or follow-up needed.
How to use this architecture review checklist
Review while difficult-to-reverse choices can still change, revisit the design before launch, and repeat after a significant architecture change. AWS recommends continuous review as a workload evolves, a consistent and blame-free approach, and an action list prioritized in business context. Its Well-Architected Framework calls review “a constructive conversation about architectural decisions, and is not an audit mechanism.” AWS Well-Architected Framework and AWS review process guidance describe this approach.
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Invite the people who build and operate the system, along with the relevant security, infrastructure, architecture, and business stakeholders. A formal review board is one option: AWS describes a cross-functional model that can include Security, Development, Enterprise Architecture, Infrastructure, and Operations, with a design review before build or purchase and a possible deployment check that the implementation matches the reviewed design. Smaller teams can bring those responsibilities into the same conversation without creating a board. AWS’s architecture review board article was published April 14, 2025.
Answer informally where facts are clear; record questions that need evidence gathered outside the meeting. For example, “did we activate encryption or not?” is a factual question that may require investigation rather than an assumption based on a diagram. End with actions, named owners, due dates, and explicit decisions about any risk the business accepts.
41 architecture review questions
1. Context and constraints
- What user or business outcome is this system meant to deliver, and how will we know it is delivering it?
- Which workloads, usage patterns, environments, and regions must the design support?
- What data does the system handle, how is it classified, and where may it be stored or processed?
- Which upstream and downstream dependencies, service boundaries, or organizational constraints shape the design?
- Which regulatory, contractual, or internal-policy obligations apply, and who has confirmed that interpretation?
- Which important assumptions remain unverified, and what evidence would validate or invalidate each one?
2. Requirements and trade-offs
- Which quality attributes matter most for this workload, and what measurable target defines success for each?
- What latency and throughput does the system need to meet during ordinary and peak use?
- What availability and recovery objectives apply, and who agreed to them?
- Where are we deliberately trading latency, throughput, availability, recovery, cost, sustainability, or delivery speed against one another?
- What measurement, prototype, prior workload evidence, or documented rationale supports the chosen trade-offs?
3. Security, privacy, and compliance
- What sensitive data is collected, why is each item necessary, and how is its classification documented?
- Which users, services, and administrators can access the system and its data, and how are identities and privileges controlled?
- How is data protected at rest, in transit, and, where relevant to the threat model, in use?
- Which threats and abuse cases have been assessed, and what controls mitigate the material ones?
- How are access and security-relevant events logged, reviewed, and made useful for investigation?
- What retention, deletion, privacy, and applicable compliance obligations govern the data and system?
- Which security controls are built into the design and delivery lifecycle early, and who verifies that they work?
Security prompts should be tailored to jurisdiction, threat model, data sensitivity, and organizational policy; answering a checklist does not establish compliance. Google Cloud’s security guidance emphasizes collaboration, security by design, zero trust, early lifecycle controls, and attention to regulatory, compliance, and privacy needs. Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework: Security.
4. Reliability and recovery
- Which component, dependency, or human-error failure modes are expected, and what happens in each case?
- What recovery time and recovery point objectives apply, and where are they documented?
- What evidence shows that backups can be restored and recovery procedures meet those objectives?
- Which dependencies share a failure domain with the system, and how could their outage affect it?
- How are health, incidents, degraded operation, and failover detected and handled?
5. Performance and capacity
- What latency and throughput targets apply under normal load, and how do they change at peak?
- How will teams detect bottlenecks, saturation, and performance regressions before users are seriously affected?
- What scaling assumptions underpin the design, and which have been validated by a representative test or measurement?
- How will data growth and workload variability affect capacity, performance, and service limits over time?
6. Operations and change
- Who owns the service in production, and are operational responsibilities clear across teams?
- Can the team deploy, monitor, troubleshoot, and roll back changes safely using documented procedures?
- Which signals, dashboards, and alerts help operators identify and diagnose user-impacting problems?
- How are architecture documentation and decision records maintained as the system changes?
7. Cost, sustainability, and simplicity
- What are the main cost drivers, and how will actual costs be measured against expectations?
- What resource or environmental impacts matter for this workload, and how are they considered alongside other requirements?
- Do managed services or additional components provide enough value to justify their cost and operational complexity?
- Can the design be simplified without violating a stated requirement or increasing a material risk?
8. Boundaries, dependencies, and evolution
- Are components coupled in ways that make independent change, testing, or failure isolation difficult?
- Which decisions are difficult to reverse, and what evidence justifies making them now?
- What compatibility, migration, and retirement plan exists for changing or replacing components?
9. Decision and action
- Which material risks remain, and who has authority to accept each one?
- What evidence is missing, and what investigation, prototype, measurement, or exercise will obtain it?
- For each unresolved gap, what is the next action, who owns it, and when is it due?
Turn findings into decisions, not scores
Prioritize findings by business impact, likelihood, and the difficulty of changing course—not by the number of questions answered. Separate hard constraints from preferences, and compare plausible alternatives against the same workload-specific criteria: security and privacy, reliability and recovery, performance and scaling, operational skill and effort, lifecycle cost, sustainability, change risk, and implementation complexity. For each unresolved assumption, state whether it needs a prototype, measurement, threat assessment, or operational exercise.
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Cloud frameworks can help teams remember areas to examine, but they are prompts rather than neutral scoring standards for every system. AWS Well-Architected Framework v13, published November 6, 2024, names operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability as its six pillars. AWS Well-Architected Framework v13. Google Cloud’s framework, last reviewed January 28, 2026, also has six pillars—security, reliability, performance, cost, operations, and sustainability—and says it applies to cloud, migrated, hybrid, and multicloud workloads. Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework.
Google Cloud also emphasizes designing for change, maintaining useful architecture documentation, simplicity, and decoupling. Statelessness can improve reliability and scalability in some designs, but statefulness, coupling, and managed-service choices should be judged against actual requirements rather than treated as universal rules. Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework.
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Close the review with a short decision record: the important trade-offs, accepted risks and approvers, evidence still needed, and each follow-up’s owner and due date. A checklist can reveal where to look; it cannot by itself prove security, compliance, resilience, or production readiness.
Quick Recap
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