Conclusion

The goal of the Government Lens for the Well-Architected Framework is to provide architectural and operational best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, effective, sustainable, and compliant government services on AWS. The considerations for the traditional Well-Architected pillars, combined with an additional section on enabling service outcomes for government, provides a well-rounded framework for verifying that government services built on AWS are best able to meet the special needs, context, and purpose of government customers. This approach is repeatable, extendable, and able to support meaningful discussions with government customers about the mission, purpose, and intended outcomes of their systems and services.

Architectures for government workloads need to incorporate policy considerations along with high privacy, security, and evidence-based compliance design patterns, effective measurement and feedback loops for continuous improvement, and strong governance to help maintain compliant, legitimate services and systems that can withstand the necessary accountability and scrutiny of government. Government customers need to continually monitor, measure, and detect changes or unintended impacts to meet their policy and legislative requirements.

Business continuity is critical not only to achieve business resiliency and performance objectives, but also to verify that people and communities are supported in times of high stress or emergencies. This lens was designed to support AWS builders and architects to take government needs and context into account in the design, delivery, and operation of government systems and services.