The 7 Pillars of WAF++
A vendor-neutral structure that covers every critical dimension of cloud architecture quality — from security and cost to digital sovereignty. Built for real engineering, not marketing slides.
All 7 Pillars at a glance
Each pillar covers a distinct dimension of cloud architecture quality. Together they form the complete WAF++ framework — open, vendor-neutral, and community-driven.
Controls, threat modeling, policy-as-code, and secure defaults across every layer of your cloud workloads.
FinOps practices, cost transparency, budget guardrails, and right-sizing — make every cloud dollar intentional.
Architecture choices, scalability patterns, latency targets, and compute efficiency — performance as a product.
Resilience engineering, HA/DR design, error budgets, SLOs, and robust operating models for production.
Runbooks, incident response, operational standards, and automation — run cloud workloads with confidence.
Minimize environmental footprint through efficient resource usage, carbon-aware design, and sustainable platform decisions.
Data sovereignty, compliance with European regulations, vendor neutrality, and exit strategies — the pillar unique to WAF++. Retain full control of your data and infrastructure across any cloud provider.
How to use the 7 Pillars
The 7 Pillars are a living reference — not a one-time audit. They guide architecture decisions, platform standards, and continuous governance across your engineering organization.
Evaluate every new platform or cloud architecture against all seven pillars — covering security, cost, resilience, and sovereignty in one structured pass before production.
Build golden paths, guardrails, and default configurations on top of the pillars. Define what "good" looks like — enforced automatically by WAFPass in CI/CD.
Use the pillars as a governance reference mapped to GDPR, BSI C5, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 — turning architecture decisions into auditable, traceable evidence.
Three levels of maturity across all pillars
WAF++ defines a maturity model for each pillar — assess where you are, plan what to improve, and track progress over time.
Foundational standards and minimum requirements in place. Security basics, cost tagging, SLO definitions, and data residency configured. The starting point for any cloud workload.
Repeatable patterns, automation, and clearly defined guardrails. Golden paths in use, WAFPass integrated in CI/CD, architecture decisions documented as ADRs across all seven pillars.
Measurable optimization in cost, performance, resilience, and governance. Continuous feedback loops, proactive capacity planning, and sovereign-by-design infrastructure at scale.
Validate all 7 pillars against your IaC
Automated controls for every pillar — Terraform, CDK, and more. Static analysis, no cloud credentials, results in seconds.
Ready to design with all 7 pillars?
Dive into the documentation, validate your infrastructure with WAFPass, or join the community to contribute controls and governance feedback.