Earlier this year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the availability of the Well‑Architected Data Residency with Hybrid Cloud Services Lens, a new extension of the AWS Well‑Architected Framework aimed at helping organizations design and operate hybrid cloud workloads that must comply with complex data residency and sovereignty requirements. The announcement underscores AWS’s growing focus on governance, regulatory compliance, and hybrid operations as enterprises increasingly balance cloud adoption with on‑premises and geopolitical data constraints.
The Well‑Architected Framework provides architectural best practices across six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. The newly published Data Residency with Hybrid Cloud Services (DRHC) Lens delivers prescriptive guidance mapped to each of these pillars, specifically for hybrid environments where data location, legal compliance, and sovereignty policies matter.
At its core, the DRHC Lens helps architects and engineering leaders design hybrid cloud workloads that comply with data residency requirements. It guides organizations in classifying workloads and datasets, establishing operational practices for data sovereignty, leveraging AWS regional services to enforce compliance, and applying automation to reduce errors and maintain consistent governance. Applying the lens allows teams to validate their data handling practices and implement actionable recommendations to address gaps.
The guidance incorporates four general design principles. Organizations are encouraged to classify data to determine which workloads must remain on‑premises and which can be moved to the cloud, define operational models with appropriate accounts, privileges, and naming conventions, use regional services such as AWS Organizations, AWS Control Tower, and IAM Access Analyzer to complement on‑premises solutions, and automate infrastructure and deployment to ensure compliance while accelerating operations.
In practical terms, the guidance bridges cloud‑native and on‑premises architecture design considerations, emphasizing use cases spanning industries with compliance requirements. These include public sector, healthcare, financial services, and other regulated industries where regulatory regimes demand explicit control over data placement and movement. Organizations operating distributed hybrid environments can use the lens to systematically assess design choices and identify gaps against recommended practices.
The lens also aligns its guidance with AWS infrastructure constructs such as AWS Outposts and AWS Local Zones, which enable customers to run AWS services closer to their data or within local jurisdictions while maintaining operational integration with centralized AWS Regions. Detailed recommendations address reliability patterns for hybrid deployments, performance considerations when balancing latency with data locality, cost tradeoffs for managed vs. on‑premises components, and sustainability practices that factor energy and footprint considerations into data placement decisions.
The DRHC Lens offers guidance for building resilient, compliant hybrid cloud architectures, covering data classification, operational practices, security controls, cost optimization, and automation. By applying these principles, organizations can integrate on‑premises and cloud resources while maintaining control over data location and unlocking the full benefits of AWS Hybrid Cloud services.
