Well-Architected — 6 pillars to verify before shipping

Every ARCH document for non-nano work must answer the 6 pillar questions below. Skipping a pillar is allowed only if explicitly justified (e.g. "Sustainability: N/A — backend-only, runs in shared infra.").

This is adapted from AWS Well-Architected (lens: small-team SaaS / LLM applications), trimmed to questions that matter at <10 engineer scale.

Pillar 1 — Operational excellence

Questions

1. Observability: What metrics, logs, traces do we emit? How do we tell from a dashboard if this is working in prod?
2. Deployability: How do we ship a change? CI gates? Rollback path?
3. Runbooks: When this breaks at 3am, what does on-call read?

Pass criteria