Free self-check
The Azure Well-Architected Self-Check
Twenty-five questions across the five Well-Architected pillars, answerable without a workshop, plus the section Microsoft’s assessment does not ask: what your estate means under GDPR, NIS2, and DORA. Answer for the estate you actually run, not the one on the architecture diagram; a hesitant yes counts as a no.
- Five questions per pillar: reliability, security, cost optimization, operational excellence, performance efficiency, the same grouping Microsoft’s own framework uses, so the score maps straight onto their assessment tool.
- The questions that separate tested recovery from documented recovery: a runbook that has been through a failover exercise scores differently from one that has only been written down.
- The DACH section: GDPR Article 44 transfer documentation, the NIS2 24-hour reporting deadline, and the DORA ICT register, the three points a generic Well-Architected review skips.
- A scoring guide that tells you what your “no” count means: which pillar to fix first, and whether the gap is a configuration change or an architecture review.
Common questions
How is this different from Microsoft's own Well-Architected Review?
Microsoft's tool scores the same five pillars against Microsoft's own criteria. This self-check adds the section that tool skips: what your estate means under GDPR Article 44, the NIS2 24-hour reporting deadline, and the DORA ICT register, so a DACH-regulated estate gets scored on the obligations that actually apply to it.
Should I answer for one workload or the whole estate?
Score the landing zone or workload you are accountable for, not a hypothetical average across the estate. Answering at estate level hides which specific workload needs the architecture review first.
What happens after I submit the form?
The self-check downloads immediately. No call gets scheduled automatically; if you want to talk through the score, the Azure Architecture Review is the next step, not a requirement.
A few pillars scored low. Does that mean we need a full review?
One weak pillar is often a configuration change: a runbook untested against failover, a missing tag policy. Three or more weak pillars, or a low score on reliability and security together, is what the Azure Architecture Review is built to fix.