Well-Architected Automation; AWS now mandates it.
AWS has made it clear: Manual reviews are out. Automation is now required to maintain your WAFR status.
That means:
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Every AWS partner is now scrambling for tooling.
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You’re not alone. And you’re not early.
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There’s no time for internal projects that never end.
You have super-smart engineers, but let’s talk about the “Build It Ourselves” Trap
We get it. You’ve got smart, capable and motivated engineers. They say: “We could build that in-house.” Sure. You could. But should you?
The Risk
The Reality
Time to market
Front-loaded investment
Staff attrition
Ongoing maintenance overhead
Opportunity cost
No external sales prospects to monetise it
“We can’t do WAFRs without it - is it ready yet?”
“It’s cost how much so far?? At least we'll monetise it.”
“Now that Ken's left we'll have to get Karen onto it.”
“We have to pull Karen off the project to update it.”
“We can only do that project if Ken stops building it.”
“We can't sell it - customers see us as a competitor.”
A Real Example: What Happened at a major Australian Telco
“We started building our own internal WAFR automation tool - it made sense at the time. Unfortunately, after 18 months of sunk effort, staff churn and client delays, we realised the cost of maintaining it was higher than just using 6pillars.ai from the beginning. The kicker? We couldn’t even monetise it beyond our own use.”
Lead Cloud Architect, Major Australian Telco
Here’s What Smart AWS Partners Do Instead
They automate WAFRs with a product that:
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Is already integrated with the AWS Well-Architected Tool
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Offers click-to-remediate workflows
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Gets teams up to speed in <30 minutes and automating reviews in <1 hour
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Delivers automated Foundational Technical Reviews (FTRs) in <2 hours as well
