Architecture Advisor Overview
The Architecture Advisor is Guardian Pro's infrastructure intelligence engine. It goes beyond individual resource checks to analyse how your AWS services connect, depend on each other, and behave as a system -- giving you a holistic view of your architecture's strengths and weaknesses.
While security scanners evaluate resources in isolation, the Architecture Advisor evaluates your infrastructure as an interconnected whole. It detects risks that only become visible when you understand the relationships between resources -- single points of failure, blast radius concerns, availability zone concentration, and more.
What the Architecture Advisor Delivers
The Architecture Advisor brings together six capabilities into a unified architecture intelligence layer:
| Capability | What It Does |
|---|---|
| Health Score | A single 0-100 score reflecting your infrastructure's overall architectural health across five dimensions |
| Risk Radar | Continuous detection of nine architectural risk types, from single points of failure to modernisation opportunities |
| Failure Simulator | Select any resource and simulate what happens if it fails -- see the full cascade of affected services |
| Architecture Map | An interactive topology diagram showing every resource, its dependencies, and how they group within your VPCs |
| Growth Readiness | A maturity assessment that evaluates whether your architecture is ready for your next stage of growth |
| IaC Governance | Detects when your live infrastructure has drifted from its CloudFormation templates and provides corrected versions |
How It Works
The Architecture Advisor builds on Guardian Pro's resource discovery and dependency mapping. After each scan:
- Resource relationships are mapped -- Guardian Pro identifies how resources connect to and depend on each other (for example, an EC2 instance behind a load balancer, within a subnet, inside a VPC).
- A dependency graph is constructed -- These relationships form a graph that represents your entire infrastructure topology.
- AI-powered analysis runs -- The Architecture Advisor analyses this graph to detect patterns, risks, and opportunities that are invisible when looking at resources individually.
- Results are prioritised -- Detected risks are scored by severity and potential impact, so you know where to focus first.
The Architecture Advisor analyses your infrastructure topology automatically after every resource discovery scan. You do not need to trigger it separately.
Navigating the Architecture Advisor
The Architecture Advisor is accessible from the main navigation bar. The page is organised into tabs, each corresponding to one of the six capabilities:
- Overview -- Your health score, top risks, and growth readiness summary at a glance
- Risk Radar -- All detected architectural risks with severity, affected resources, and fix actions
- Architecture Map -- The interactive topology diagram of your infrastructure
- Failure Simulator -- The cascade failure analysis tool
- Growth Readiness -- Your maturity assessment with dimension-level scores
- IaC Governance -- Pending template updates and stack health
Integration with Other Modules
The Architecture Advisor does not operate in isolation. It connects deeply with other Guardian Pro capabilities:
- Action Centre -- Architectural risks appear alongside security findings and cost recommendations, with fix actions you can apply directly.
- AI Assistant -- Ask the AI assistant about your architecture risks, request failure simulations, or get explanations of specific risks in plain language.
- Compliance -- Architectural risks map to relevant compliance controls (for example, the AWS Well-Architected Framework's Reliability pillar).
- Cost Intelligence -- Consolidation opportunities and underutilised resource risks connect to cost optimisation recommendations.
Use the AI Assistant to ask questions like "What are my biggest architecture risks?" or "Simulate what happens if my primary database fails." The assistant has full access to Architecture Advisor data and can provide detailed explanations.
When to Use the Architecture Advisor
The Architecture Advisor is valuable at several stages of your cloud journey:
| Scenario | What to Use |
|---|---|
| After initial onboarding | Review the Architecture Map and Health Score to understand your baseline |
| Before a production deployment | Run a Failure Simulation on critical resources to validate resilience |
| During architecture review | Use Growth Readiness to assess whether your infrastructure supports your scaling plans |
| After manual infrastructure changes | Check IaC Governance for template drift |
| When investigating an incident | Use the Architecture Map and Failure Simulator to understand blast radius |
| During cost optimisation | Review consolidation opportunities and underutilised resource risks |
Understanding Risk Severity
Architectural risks are classified by severity, following the same model used across Guardian Pro:
| Severity | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Critical | Immediate architectural weakness that could cause significant service disruption or data loss |
| High | Important architectural gap that should be addressed in the near term |
| Medium | A best-practice deviation that should be planned for remediation |
| Low | An optimisation opportunity or informational finding |
Next Steps
- Health Score -- Understand the five factors that determine your infrastructure's health score.
- Risk Radar -- Learn about the nine types of architectural risks Guardian Pro detects.
- Failure Simulator -- Run your first cascade failure simulation.
- Architecture Map -- Explore your infrastructure topology visually.