AWS Foundational Technical Reviews (FTRs): 5 Key Areas to Review Before You Optimise Your AWS Infrastructure

AWS Foundational Technical Review (FTR) preparation often leads teams to focus heavily on compliance checklists, but it's critical not to overlook the structural soundness of your cloud environment. AWS infrastructure optimisation is more than a technical formality—it underpins the security, resilience, and efficiency required to succeed in the cloud.

AWS FTR readiness requires more than passing a review. In this post, we explore five high-impact areas to optimise within your AWS environment to not only pass your AWS foundational technical review, but to improve your cloud architecture holistically.

AWS Foundational Technical Review/FTR Key Area 1: Environment Consistency Through Automation

AWS FTR reviewers assess whether your infrastructure is predictably and securely provisioned. Manual, ad hoc setups raise concerns. Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) promotes repeatability, scalability, and reduces human error.

What to check:

• Are all environments (dev/staging/prod) built using IaC (CloudFormation, CDK, Terraform)?

• Is drift detection in place?

• Are changes version-controlled and auditable?

Optimisation tip: Use AWS CloudFormation StackSets or Terraform Workspaces to standardise environments across accounts and regions. Integrate change tracking with GitOps pipelines.

AWS Infrastructure Optimisation Key Area 2: Resilience and Fault Isolation

AWS foundational technical review requirements include evidence of a resilient infrastructure. Reviewers assess your architecture’s ability to recover from failures and isolate faults. Relying on a single Availability Zone or region introduces significant risks.

What to check:

• Are workloads distributed across multiple AZs?

• Do load balancers support health checks and automatic failover?

• Is a disaster recovery plan in place and tested?

Optimisation tip: Leverage Amazon Route 53 with failover routing and Amazon RDS multi-AZ to meet AWS FTR resilience expectations.

AWS FTR Key Area 3: Intelligent Resource and Cost Management

AWS infrastructure optimisation is an ongoing effort that reflects architectural maturity and cost awareness. Reviewers look for usage of tools that monitor, right-size, and optimise resource use.

What to check:

• Are idle or orphaned resources regularly identified and removed?

• Are AWS Cost Explorer, Trusted Advisor, and Compute Optimizer being used?

• Is tagging enforced for resource accountability?

Optimisation tip: Automate resource cleanup with AWS Lambda and Config Rules. Adopt Savings Plans and Spot Instances for cost-effective capacity.

AWS Well-Architected Framework Review Key Area 4: Secure and Scalable Network Design

AWS foundational technical review/FTR evaluates whether your network architecture supports security and scalability. Poor network design leads to fragility and exposure.

What to check:

• Are subnets logically segmented into public/private?

• Do security groups enforce least privilege?

• Are VPC endpoints or AWS PrivateLink in use?

Optimisation tip: Reduce NAT Gateway sprawl and cross-AZ traffic. Use scoped IAM conditions to minimise over-permissioning.

AWS Well-Architected Framework Review Key Area 5: Observability and Operational Readiness

AWS FTR places strong emphasis on your ability to detect, respond to, and recover from incidents. Logging alone isn’t enough—observability must drive action.

What to check:

• Are logs, metrics, and traces aggregated via CloudWatch, X-Ray, or OpenTelemetry?

• Are alert thresholds actionable?

• Are incident response playbooks and escalation paths documented?

Optimisation tip: Deploy CloudWatch Composite Alarms and integrate with Opsgenie or PagerDuty for structured incident handling.

AWS Infrastructure Optimisation Final Thoughts

AWS foundational technical review success depends on more than documentation—it requires well-architected, observable, and cost-effective systems. Embedding these five focus areas will help you meet and exceed AWS FTR expectations.

Automation is a key component of AWS success. Whether it’s provisioning, remediation, tagging, or cost control, automated solutions help your infrastructure scale safely and remain continuously aligned with AWS best practices.

Need help preparing for your AWS Foundational Technical Review (FTR)?

At 6pillars, we specialise in automating infrastructure assessments, saving days of manual form filling for even fully-compliant organisations. This can optionally include automated remediation and end-to-end AWS Well-Architected Framework Review guidance to accelerate your path to cloud excellence.