What's new in the Well-Architected Framework

Last reviewed 2026-10-02 UTC

This document lists significant changes to the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework.

October 2, 2026

• Operational excellence pillar: Updated the Plan and manage capacity recommendation with the following guidance:
  • Design for flexibility and efficiency by using future reservations and Flex-start VMs.
  • Configure managed instance groups (MIGs) with instance and location flexibility.

September 11, 2026

• AI and ML perspective:
  • Replaced references to deprecated Vertex Explainable AI across the perspective with guidance to use tabular explanations and general explainability techniques.
  • Updated the Optimize self-managed serving section in AI and ML perspective: Performance optimization to recommend multi-host inferencing using Pathways.

August 18, 2026

• Cost optimization pillar: Updated Align cloud spending with business value with recommendations to adopt unit economics to measure unit margins and balance cloud spending against revenue or business metrics.

August 12, 2026

• Security, privacy, and compliance pillar: Updated Implement zero trust with expanded guidance on the following topics:
  • Segmenting networks by using multiple Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks and Shared VPC.
  • Preventing data exfiltration by using VPC Service Controls and strict egress firewall rules.

July 13, 2026

• Reliability pillar: Added information in Perform testing for recovery from failures about how Google Cloud conducts periodic zone and region disconnect testing in a production-equivalent environment.

July 6, 2026

• Financial services (FS) perspective: Updated FS perspective: Cost optimization to note that Google Cloud enables resource-based committed use discount (CUD) sharing across projects by default for most Cloud Billing accounts.

June 15, 2026

• Sustainability pillar: Updated Continuously measure and improve sustainability with the following guidance:
  • Align resource hierarchy and annotations with business units before exporting Carbon Footprint data.
  • Validate cost-based carbon assumptions against location-based and market-based metrics.
  • Track the removal of unattended projects through IT service management (ITSM) workflows.
  • Integrate monthly BigQuery carbon exports into FinOps dashboards such as Looker.

May 4, 2026

• AI and ML perspective: Updated AI and ML perspective: Operational excellence to recommend Memorystore for Valkey, Memorystore for Redis, and Memorystore for Redis Cluster for caching frequently accessed data, replacing deprecated Memorystore for Memcached.

February 13, 2026

• AI and ML perspective: Performance optimization: Major update to expand the performance-optimization recommendations.

January 28, 2026

• Sustainability pillar: Expanded the sustainability guidance as a full-fledged pillar.

November 26, 2025

• AI and ML perspective: Security: Major update to expand the security recommendations in the AI and ML perspective.

August 7, 2025

• AI and ML perspective: Reliability: Major update to expand the reliability recommendations in the AI and ML perspective.

July 28, 2025

• Added the Financial services industry (FSI) perspective. These documents describe principles and recommendations that are specific to FSI, aligned to each pillar of the Architecture Framework.

May 28, 2025

• AI and ML perspective: Cost optimization: Major update to expand the cost optimization recommendations in the AI and ML perspective.

April 28, 2025

• AI and ML perspective: Operational excellence: Major update to expand the operational excellence recommendations in the AI and ML perspective.

February 5, 2025

• Security, privacy, and compliance pillar: Major update to align the recommendations with core principles of security, privacy, and compliance.

December 30, 2024

• Reliability pillar: Major update to align the recommendations with core principles of reliability.

December 6, 2024

• Performance optimization pillar: Major update to align the recommendations with core principles of performance optimization.

October 31, 2024

• Operational excellence pillar: Major update to align the recommendations with core principles of operational excellence.

October 11, 2024

• Added the AI and ML perspective. These documents describe principles and recommendations that are specific to AI and ML, aligned to each pillar of the Architecture Framework.

September 25, 2024

• Cost optimization pillar: Major update to align the recommendations with core principles of cost optimization.

August 27, 2024

• The System Design category of the Architecture Framework has been removed. The guidance in this category is available in other Google Cloud documentation.

June 4, 2024

• Cost optimization category:
  • Added information about monitoring the cost of Dataflow resources.
  • Add recommendations for optimizing cost by using the at-least-once streaming mode and the dynamic thread scaling feature.

May 31, 2024

• Cost optimization category:
  • Added information about the FinOps hub.

May 30, 2024

• System design category:
  • Added a new design principle, Design for change.

May 23, 2024

• Cost optimization category:
  • Added guidance in Optimize cost: Compute, containers, and serverless about reducing cost by suspending idle Compute Engine VMs .

May 16, 2024

• System design category:
  • Added information about the Batch service in Choose and manage compute.

May 9, 2024

• Cost optimization category:
  • Updated guidance about Dataflow Shuffle in Optimize cost: Databases and smart analytics.

April 22, 2024

• Cost optimization category:
  • Added a recommendation about considering storage cost when configuring the log-retention period in Optimize cost: Cloud operations.

March 29, 2024

• Reliability category:
  • Reorganized the guidance related to SLOs and SLIs to improve usability and alignment with SRE guidance.

January 4, 2024

• Performance optimization category:
  • Updated the guidance for Network Service Tiers.

November 28, 2023

• Reliability category:
  • Reorganized the content to improve readability and consistency:
  • Define SLOs: Moved "Terminology" section to new page: Terminology
  • Adopt SLOs: Moved "SLOs and Alerts" section to new page: SLOs and Alerts

November 9, 2023

• System design category:
  • Added guidance to help cloud architects to choose deployment archetypes for workloads in Google Cloud.