Are you familiar with the Well-Architected framework in AWS? Basically, it is a set of best practices to follow when building and planning workloads. The aim of this tool is to do two main things, a) create a custom "lens" to build you own best practices or internal standards/requirements, and b) importantly, to perform a review that results in actionable data you can use to inform improvements and future planning. You can either use the custom lens with the AWS well architected tool or use it standalone with this file.
Building Custom Lenses
This application is a tool for creating a Custom Lens for the AWS Well Architected Tool. You can create custom lenses with your own pillars, questions, best practices, and improvement plan.
Custom Lenses can be fully built out and then exported in the JSON format to easily create and import into the AWS Well Architected Tool. Custom Lenses can be developed to address many issues including internal development standards, particular compliance requirements and many other reasons.
This tool follows the specifications outlined in the link here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/userguide/lenses-format-specification.html
Workloads to preview Custom lenses and perform reviews
Using this tool you can also preview workloads to perform a review, or use this tool as a standalone tool to perform a review. While there are advantages to using the AWS Well achitected tool, especially if you are developing workloads in AWS, reviewing a workload in this tool can be used independently.
Custom Lenses are best when you take the time to build out helpful resources and links for every question and option that represents best practices. This can be used to identify high and medium risk items to address and build a report for an improvement plan.
What is a Workload? It depends on several factors, including your point of view, what priorities you may have set, and how you define the scope of the review. It can include a human component and include nontechnical objectives.
Reviews should be
• Collaborative: working together with stakeholders to improve
• Prescriptive: based on pragmatic, proven advice
• Recurring: occur throughout the lifecycle of a workload
Reviews are meant to by cyclical, where you perform the review to identify areas of improvement, then repeat the process to continually monitor and continue to improve workloads.
Credentials for the sample file:
admin/admin
Also included are two custom lenses that can be used in evaluating workloads, or referenced when building your own custom lenses.
This is also an effort to bring the concepts of "Well-Architected" to the greater FileMaker community. Special thanks to Mislav Kos for contributing to development of both this file and building a custom lens. Mislav presented topic at the Claris Engage conference in 2025. If you have access to those sessions, you can also watch his presentation.