Operational Excellence And Best Practices

Amazon Web Services (AWS) upgraded its Well-Architected Framework a few years ago at the AWS re: Invent conference, adding a new pillar to the family: Operational Excellence. In this post, we’ll look at what AWS Operational Excellence architecture looks like, as well as how to get started following operational best practices.

What is Operational Excellence?

The ability to support the development and operate workloads effectively, acquire insight into their operations, and constantly enhance supporting processes and procedures to generate business value are all part of the Operational Excellence pillar.

The operational excellence pillar gives you a quick rundown of design principles, best practices, and questions. The AWS Operational Excellence Pillar whitepaper contains prescriptive implementation advice.

Design principles

In order to achieve operational excellence in the cloud, there are five design principles to follow:

• Perform operations as code: In the cloud, you may apply the same engineering discipline to your whole environment that you use for application code. You may define and change your whole workload (applications, infrastructure) as code. You may write your operations procedures in code and trigger them in response to events to automate their execution. You may reduce human error and ensure consistent responses to events by conducting activities as code.
• Make frequent, small, reversible changes: Workloads should be designed such that components may be updated on a regular basis. Make tiny modifications that can be undone if they don’t work (without affecting customers when possible).
• Refine operations procedures on a regular basis: As you use operations procedures, look for ways to make them better. As your workload changes, adjust your methods accordingly. Set aside time on a regular basis to examine and check that all processes are working and that the teams are aware of them.
• Anticipate failure: Prepare for failure by doing “pre-mortem” exercises to identify probable failure sources that may be eliminated or minimized. Validate your grasp of the impact of your failure scenarios by putting them to the test. Test your response processes to make sure they’re working and that everyone knows how to use them. Set aside time on a regular basis to evaluate workloads and team reactions to simulated situations.
• Learn from all operational failures: Use the lessons learned from all operational events and failures to drive progress. Share what you’ve learned with other teams and the entire company.

Definition

In the cloud, there are four areas where best practices may be found:

• Organization
• Prepare
• Operate
• Evolve

Business objectives are defined by the leadership of your company. To assist the achievement of business objectives, your company must understand needs and priorities and use them to organize and perform activities. Your task must produce the data required to support it. By automating repetitive operations, you may improve the flow of beneficial changes into production by implementing services to facilitate integration, deployment, and delivery of your workload.

There might be risks in the way your workload is run. You must be aware of the risks and make an informed decision about whether or not to go into production. Your teams must be able to support your workload. You’ll be able to understand the health of your workload, your operations activities, and respond to events using business and operational indicators generated from intended business outcomes. As your company’s demands and environment evolve, so will your priorities. Utilize them as a feedback loop to ensure that your organization and workload are always improving.

Best practices

Organization

To determine the priorities that will enable business success, your teams must have a shared awareness of your total workload, their role in it, and shared business goals. The advantages of your efforts will be maximized if you have well-defined priorities. Evaluate internal and external consumer needs with key stakeholders, including business, development, and operations teams, to determine where to spend resources.

By assessing client demands, you can guarantee that you have a complete picture of the assistance needed to meet corporate objectives. Make sure you’re aware of any organizational governance guidelines or obligations, as well as any external elements, such as regulatory compliance requirements and industry standards, that may demand or stress a certain emphasis. Check that you have systems in place to detect changes in internal governance and external compliance needs. If no requirements have been established, be sure you’ve applied due diligence before making a decision. Regularly review your priorities so that they may be revised when circumstances change.

If your company is subject to external regulatory or compliance standards, you should use the materials offered by AWS Cloud Compliance to assist educate your teams and analyze the effect on your goals.

AWS can assist you in informing your teams about AWS and its services so that they are more aware of how their decisions affect your workload. To educate your teams, you should use AWS Support’s resources (AWS Knowledge Center, AWS Discussion Forums, and AWS Support Center) as well as AWS Documentation.

To assist manage your operating models, you should use tools or services that allow you to centrally regulate your environments across accounts, such as AWS Organizations. AWS Control Tower extends this management capability by allowing you to design blueprints (that support your operational models) for account creation, apply continuous governance via AWS Organizations, and automate account provisioning. AWS Managed Services, AWS Managed Services Partners, and Managed Services Providers in the AWS Partner Network, for example, provide experience in creating cloud environments and supporting your security and compliance requirements as well as your business objectives.

Prepare

You must first understand your responsibilities and their expected behaviors in order to prepare for operational excellence. You’ll be able to construct them to offer information about their status and create processes to support them after that.

Design your workload to offer the information you need to understand its internal status across all components in order to facilitate observability and problem-solving.

Adopt methods that enhance the flow of changes into production and allow for refactoring, rapid quality feedback, and problem fixes.

Adopt methods that offer quick feedback on the quality and allow for quick recovery from modifications that do not produce the intended results.

To understand the operational risks associated with your workload, evaluate the operational preparedness of your workload, processes, procedures, and personnel. To determine whether you are ready to go live with your task or a change, you should follow a consistent method.

Your whole workload (applications, infrastructure, policy, governance, and operations) may be seen as code on AWS. This means you may apply the same engineering discipline to every aspect of your stack as you do to application code, and share them across teams or organizations to maximize the value of development efforts.

Operate

The achievement of business and customer outcomes is used to determine how well a task is managed. To assess if your workload and activities are successful, define desired results, specify how success will be measured, and select metrics that will be utilized in those calculations. The health of the workload, as well as the health and success of the operations activities done in support of the workload, are included in operational health (for example, deployment and incident response).

To achieve operational excellence, efficient and effective management of operational events is essential. This is true for both scheduled and unscheduled operating occurrences.

Communicate the operational status of workloads to the target audience via dashboards and notifications that are tailored to their needs, allowing them to take necessary action, manage their expectations, and be notified when regular operations resume.

Dashboard views of metrics gathered from workloads and directly from AWS are available in AWS. Workload insights are provided through AWS logging features such as AWS X-Ray, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and VPC Flow Logs, which enable the identification of workload issues for root cause analysis and resolution.

Evolve

To maintain operational excellence, you must learn, share, and always improve. Dedicate work cycles to creating modest gains over time. Conduct a post-incident investigation of all customer-impacting occurrences. To restrict or avoid recurrence, identify the relevant variables and take preventative measures. As needed, inform impacted communities about relevant issues. Evaluate and prioritize potential for improvement on a regular basis, taking into account both workload and operational processes. Include feedback loops in your processes to immediately discover areas for improvement and record lessons learned throughout the execution of activities.

You may transmit logs straight to Amazon S3 for long-term storage or export your log data to Amazon S3 on AWS. You may use AWS Glue to identify and prepare log data for analytics in Amazon S3, as well as save related information in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Amazon Athena can then be used to examine your log data using conventional SQL queries thanks to its direct interaction with AWS Glue. You can see, study, and analyze your data with a business intelligence tool like Amazon QuickSight. Find interesting patterns and occurrences that might help you develop.

AWS practice test & define operationally excellent architectures by ABC E-learning

You may use our website ABC E-Learning to increase your confidence before taking the AWS certification exam. Our AWS Practice Test includes sets of questions that will help you confirm your knowledge of the topics and get the confidence you’ll need to take the exam.

You also need to equip yourself with AWS Certification Preparation to grasp a high score for your exam.

Passing the official AWS certification exam is a difficult task. It requires a strong grasp of cloud computing, which may be obtained via careful study and practice. As a consequence, our AWS Test Prep can help you prepare to take on even the most difficult papers and pass with flying colors.

The reason why this certification is so difficult is that it has great value when it comes to creating countless job opportunities with an ideal salary for employees.

Read more: AWS Jobs and How to advance career with AWS Certifications.

Define Operationally Excellent Architectures is a 6% exam that requires you to know how to select design features in solutions to enable operational excellence. In order to gain more information, visit our website to take test prep as well as knowledge about this domain.

Try our AWS Practice Test or download it for your IOS or Android devices now!

I hope that this deep dive into operational excellence has encouraged you to encourage your operations teams to build a culture of continual improvement and curiosity. You may assist drive change in your business by implementing some of the best practices outlined in the AWS Well-Architected Whitepaper on Operational Excellence.