Running an Azure Well-Architected Review

A Well-Architected Review (WAR) is a structured assessment of a workload against the five pillars of the Azure Well-Architected Framework. It is conducted through a guided questionnaire in the Azure portal or the Microsoft Learn Assessments site. The output is a maturity score per pillar and a prioritised list of recommendations to improve your architecture.

To begin a Well-Architected Review, you first create a workload — a named collection of Azure resources that serve a specific business function. Grouping resources into a workload lets you evaluate them together rather than in isolation. Examples of workloads include a customer-facing e-commerce site, an internal HR application, or a data analytics pipeline.

The assessment questionnaire is divided into sections corresponding to the five pillars. Each section contains a series of multiple-choice questions about your architecture choices, such as 'Do you use availability zones for critical components?' and 'Are all secrets stored in Key Vault?'. You can complete the questionnaire in one session or save your progress and return later.

After completing the questionnaire, each pillar receives a maturity score between 0 and 100. The score reflects how closely your workload follows best practices for that pillar. Scores are color-coded: red (0-33) indicates significant gaps, yellow (34-66) means partial adoption, and green (67-100) reflects strong alignment. No workload starts at 100 — the goal is continuous improvement.

Each recommendation generated by the review includes a description of the issue, the pillar it maps to, a severity rating, and guidance on how to remediate it. Recommendations are ranked by impact so you can focus on the changes that will improve your scores the most. Some recommendations are quick wins; others require significant architectural changes.

Not all recommendations are equally important for every workload. To prioritise effectively, consider the business impact of a failure, the effort required to implement the fix, and the risk if the issue is left unaddressed. A common approach is to tackle high-severity, low-effort items first, then plan larger architectural changes for the next iteration.

The Well-Architected Review is not a one-time activity. You should re-run the assessment regularly — at least every six months or after major architectural changes. The tool saves your previous responses so you can see how your scores have changed. Tracking progress over time helps demonstrate the value of architectural investments to stakeholders.

A Well-Architected Review is most valuable when it involves participants from multiple roles. Architects can answer design questions, security engineers can address the security pillar, operations teams handle the operational excellence section, and finance stakeholders inform the cost optimisation discussion. Cross-functional participation leads to more accurate scores and better buy-in for improvements.

The Well-Architected Review and Azure Advisor are complementary but different tools. The WAR is a questionnaire-based assessment that captures your intended design choices and knowledge gaps. Azure Advisor analyses your actual deployed configuration and identifies specific resource-level issues. Using both together gives a complete picture — design intent versus operational reality.

The assessment tool allows you to export results to a PDF or CSV report, making it easy to share findings with your team or leadership. You can also share a link to the assessment with collaborators who can view the results and track improvement actions. This transparency is important for building a culture of continuous architectural improvement.

Each recommendation from the Well-Architected Review should be translated into a concrete work item in your project backlog (Azure Boards, GitHub Issues, Jira, etc.). This ensures architectural debt is tracked and prioritised alongside feature development. Teams that integrate WAR findings into their agile process consistently see better long-term architecture quality than teams that treat reviews as one-off documents.

Test your understanding of Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) concepts from this lesson.

In this lesson you learned: a Well-Architected Review is a guided questionnaire that scores a workload against the five WAF pillars; you should prioritise recommendations by impact and effort; and the review should be run regularly and linked to your team's backlog. Next up we explore Azure Advisor and how it surfaces automated improvement recommendations.