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