AWS Well-Architected Reliability pillar review for Terraform
Last reviewed: 2026-05-27
5+ years AWS engineering · Open-source contributor
Last reviewed: 2026-05-27
The AWS Well-Architected Reliability pillar covers five design areas: automatic recovery from failure, horizontal scaling to increase aggregate workload availability, removing single points of failure, managing change in automation, and testing recovery procedures. This guide maps each design principle to Terraform patterns and explains what ArchGuard evaluates in your Terraform workload.
The Reliability pillar design principles, as Terraform-aware checks
Five things ArchGuard flags most often in the Reliability pillar
- ·Single-AZ RDS deployments without Multi-AZ enabled
- ·Auto Scaling Groups with min_size = max_size = 1 (no horizontal scaling)
- ·Missing Route 53 health checks on critical endpoints
- ·EBS volumes with no snapshot lifecycle policy
- ·ALB target groups with default health check thresholds only
Further reading
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