The operational excellence pillar focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business value, and continually improving processes and procedures. Key topics include automating changes, responding to events, and defining standards to manage daily operations.

The security pillar focuses on protecting information and systems. Key topics include confidentiality and integrity of data, identifying and managing who can do what with privilege management, protecting systems, and establishing controls to detect security events.

The reliability pillar focuses on ensuring a workload performs its intended function correctly and consistently when it’s expected to. A resilient workload quickly recovers from failures to meet business and customer demand. Key topics include distributed system design, recovery planning, and how to handle change.

The performance efficiency pillar focuses on using IT and computing resources efficiently. Key topics include selecting the right resource types and sizes based on workload requirements, monitoring performance, and making informed decisions to maintain efficiency as business needs evolve.

The cost optimization pillar focuses on avoiding unnecessary costs. Key topics include understanding and controlling where money is being spent, selecting the most appropriate and right number of resource types, analyzing spend over time, and scaling to meet business needs without overspending

The Sustainability pillar focuses on environmental impacts, especially energy consumption and efficiency since they are important levers for architects to inform direct action to reduce resource usage.