You shipped the agent. It works in the demo. Your team is proud of it. Look closer, and you will find shared context everywhere, chains that collapse on unexpected input, and agents that cannot function without an orchestrator holding their hand. You have built a distributed monolith. When a microservice fails, you get a 500. When an agent fails, you might get a 200 and a corrupted state.
AWAF, the Agent Well-Architected Framework, is an open specification for building production-ready AI agents, adapted from the AWS Well-Architected Framework for the specific ways agent systems break. It defines 10 pillars across three tiers.
The Foundation tier ensures your vertical slice works end to end before anything else matters. Six adapted cloud pillars cover operational excellence, reliability, security, cost, and performance, where the tradeoffs look very different in agent land. Three agent-native pillars (Reasoning Integrity, Controllability, and Context Integrity) have no equivalent in traditional cloud architecture because agents reason, plan, and act rather than simply serve requests.
The framework is paired with awaf-cli, a CI-native tool that scores your architecture on every pull request and fails the build when something regresses.
You will leave with a concrete framework for evaluating whether an agent is production-ready, the pitfalls teams repeatedly hit, and a CLI to install the same day.