AWS Well-Architected Performance Efficiency pillar review for Terraform
Last reviewed: 2026-07-03
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Last reviewed: 2026-07-03
The AWS Well-Architected Performance Efficiency pillar is built around five design principles: democratizing advanced technologies, going global in minutes, using serverless architectures, experimenting more often, and considering mechanical sympathy (matching the resource type to the workload). This guide maps each principle to Terraform patterns and explains what ArchGuard evaluates in your HCL.
The Performance Efficiency pillar design principles, as Terraform-aware checks
Five things ArchGuard flags most often in the Performance Efficiency pillar
- ·EC2 instances using the same instance type across environments with no evidence of a right-sizing or load-testing pass
- ·Auto Scaling Groups with min_size = max_size = desired_capacity — no scaling policy attached, no elasticity to load
- ·No caching layer (ElastiCache, CloudFront) in front of a read-heavy database or origin — every request round-trips to the source
- ·RDS engine choice not justified for the access pattern (e.g. a fixed-capacity general-purpose engine for a bursty, unpredictable workload)
- ·No evidence of load testing or benchmarking informing instance_type or storage IOPS selection before launch
Further reading
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