Azure Well-Architected Review Tool

The Azure Well-Architected Review (WAR) tool is a free, self-service assessment provided by Microsoft that helps you evaluate your workload against the five pillars of the Well-Architected Framework. While Azure Advisor analyses your deployed resources automatically, the Well-Architected Review is a structured, questionnaire-based assessment that evaluates your architecture decisions, processes, and design choices.

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What Is the Well-Architected Review?

The Well-Architected Review is an online assessment hosted at https://learn.microsoft.com/assessments. You answer a series of questions about your workload's architecture, and the tool generates a detailed report with prioritised recommendations.

How It Differs from Azure Advisor

Aspect	Azure Advisor	Well-Architected Review
Type	Automated resource analysis	Questionnaire-based assessment
Input	Resource configuration and telemetry	Your answers about architecture decisions
Scope	Individual Azure resources	Entire workload architecture
Frequency	Continuous, always-on	On-demand, periodic review
Depth	Specific resource recommendations	Holistic architectural guidance
Context	Knows what you deployed	Knows how and why you designed it

Both tools are valuable and complementary. Advisor catches specific resource misconfigurations. The Well-Architected Review evaluates your overall design approach.

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How the Assessment Works

Step 1: Define Your Workload

Start by describing the workload you want to assess:

• Workload name — give it a descriptive name (e.g., "Customer Portal" or "Order Processing Service")
• Environment — production, staging, or development
• Cloud maturity — how experienced your team is with cloud architecture
• Business criticality — how important the workload is to the business

Step 2: Select Pillars to Assess

You can assess all five pillars or focus on specific areas. For your first review, it is often useful to assess all five to get a holistic view. For subsequent reviews, you might focus on the pillar that needs the most improvement.

Step 3: Answer the Questions

The assessment presents questions organised by pillar and topic. Questions cover a wide range of architectural concerns:

Reliability example questions:

• Have you defined availability targets (SLA, RTO, RPO) for this workload?
• Does your architecture use Availability Zones for production components?
• Have you implemented retry logic for transient failures?
• Do you perform regular disaster recovery drills?

Security example questions:

• Do you use managed identities instead of credentials in code?
• Are all PaaS services accessed through Private Endpoints?
• Is MFA enforced for all users?
• Do you use Azure Key Vault for secrets management?

Cost Optimisation example questions:

• Have you right-sized your compute resources based on usage data?
• Do you use Reserved Instances or Savings Plans for predictable workloads?
• Do you have budgets and alerts configured in Azure Cost Management?
• Are idle development resources shut down outside business hours?

Operational Excellence example questions:

• Is all infrastructure defined as code?
• Do you have automated CI/CD pipelines for all environments?
• Do you conduct blameless post-incident reviews?
• Are runbooks maintained for common operational scenarios?

Performance Efficiency example questions:

• Have you implemented autoscaling for your compute resources?
• Do you use caching for frequently accessed data?
• Have you conducted load testing to identify performance limits?
• Do you monitor P95 and P99 response times?

Each question has multiple-choice answers that range from "not implemented" to "fully implemented with best practices." Answer honestly — the value of the assessment depends on accurate answers.

Step 4: Review the Results