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you will always know your business better, but feedback is great and opens doors

Used to be an AWS SA, and gave a couple of WA reviews to customers. Often times, going through the items in the review highlighted areas that the customer hadn't thought about, or didn't realize could be an area for improvement. Each one fostered some really in-depth discussion around their current posture, the workload that their teams already had, and tried to build a pathway to address some of the points relative to the severity and their bandwidth.

So they can be a mixed bag IMO. The general impression I get from customers is that the team conducting it on AWS side can also make all the difference. You also need to set your expectations around what comes out of this. I think if you are looking for a starting point, they are good. If you get a good team on the AWS side, even better. If you need something deeper with tactical action items, there are better assessment approaches (especially when you have to cover tech outside of AWS e.g. GitHub repos, CI/CD pipelines, hybrid cloud etc.). For example if you want to get a good handle on security around DevOps and your cloud environment, you might want to consider conducting a DSOMM assessment and building a roadmap off that

One benefit is that it gets the devs and architects talking about the architecture and everyone gets a common understanding of their service and infrastructure. However, the biggest value is getting the most important things prioritized in the backlog. If they team doesn't do anything with their findings, it doesn't have as much value.

Thanks @Andrew Dennis @Brian Jones for your inputs. I feel it’s a starting point for anyone to get a better understanding of heir existing Infrastructure where there is no schedule for proper audits or lack of automation and governance.