AWS Well-Architected Framework: Operational Excellence Pillar
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The document outlines the AWS Well-Architected Framework with a specific focus on the Operational Excellence pillar, detailing the importance of design principles like operations as code and proactive failure anticipation. It emphasizes the need for proper preparation, operation, and evolution strategies to enhance operational efficiency while leveraging AWS services. Reliam, as an AWS certified provider, offers insights and support to organizations aiming to implement these best practices for optimal technology management.
AWS Well-Architected Framework: Operational Excellence Pillar
- 2. I’m Jonathan LaCour, CTO of Reliam ● Technologist ● Programmer ● Cloud Strategist ● Bourbon Junkie Nice to meet you! Hello there
- 3. Reliam is an AWS certified consulting and managed services provider based in Southern California. Serving customers globally from startups to enterprise, Reliam’s certified solutions architects and engineers incorporate AWS best practices including the Well Architected Framework to advise companies on workload migration, architecture and optimization to drive rapid adoption of AWS services and high customer satisfaction. Reliam’s obsessive customer focus, coupled with operational excellence, expert technical solutions, industry-leading SLAs, and proven strategies & best practices, delivers on our promise to each customer to ensure their continued success throughout the entire lifecycle of their technology journey.
- 4. Question How is your company currently using AWS?
- 5. Agenda ● Introduction to Well-Architected ● Design Principles for Operational Excellence ● Areas of Operational Excellence ○ Preparation ○ Operation ○ Evolution ● Q&A
- 7. AWS Well Architected The Five Pillars ● Operational Excellence ● Security ● Reliability ● Performance Efficiency ● Cost Optimization
- 8. AWS Well Architected Benefits ● Build and deploy faster ● Lower or mitigate risk ● Make informed decisions ● Learn AWS best practices
- 9. Reliam’s Insights from Well-Architected Reviews
- 10. Review Free Remediation $10,000 for 40 hours $5,000 AWS Service Credit Reliam Accelerated Well-Architected Review Package
- 12. Operational Excellence Design Principles Perform operations as code Annotated documentation Frequent, small, reversible changes Refine ops procedures frequently Anticipate failure Learn from all operational failures
- 13. Perform operations as code Software Engineering Practices ● Automated testing ● CI/CD pipelines ● Version control ● Code review and standards Operations as Code ● Everything is software ● Bring software practices to operations and infrastructure ● De-risk, ensure consistency
- 14. Question Has your organization adopted Infrastructure as Code?
- 15. Annotated documentation On-Prem Environments ● Manual documentation ● Prone to error ● Docs drift from reality ● Operational agility suffers Cloud Environments ● Automated documentation ● Useful to humans & systems ● Docs reflect reality ● Operational agility improves
- 16. Frequent, small, reversible changes Traditional Approach ● Software releases are large, high-risk bundles of changes ● Agile practitioners bundle many “sprints” into a release ● Systems are monolithic Continuous Approach ● Change is the new normal ● Systems are composed of small, focused components ● All changes are designed to be quickly reversible
- 17. Question What is your typical release cadence?
- 18. Refine operations procedures frequently Software Engineering Procedures ● Regular cadence of “retrospective” meetings ● Improvements progressively integrated Operations Procedures ● Regular cadence of “game days” and associated retros ● Improvements progressively integrated
- 19. Question Does your organization have regular “Game Days?”
- 20. Anticipate failure Typical Operations Teams ● Reactive approach to failure ● Post-mortem exercises after failures, if at all ● Problems usually discovered in production Operationally Excellent Teams ● Proactive approach to failure ● Pre-mortem exercises ● Test, validate, & measure scenarios in Game Days ● Problems usually anticipated
- 21. Question Do you regularly schedule “pre-mortem” meetings?
- 22. Learn from all operational failures Evolution Requires Sharing ● Drive change by sharing ● Involve product, marketing, and finance in improvements ● Establish a culture of continuous evolution
- 24. Focus: Preparation Operational Priorities Successful operations teams are enlightened operations teams. ● Experts on their workloads ● Aware of shared business goals ● Clearly understand their role ● Grasp of regulatory and compliance constraints Proper prioritization without context is impossible.
- 25. Question Do you feel that your operations teams are enlightened?
- 26. Focus: Preparation Design for Operations Intentionally consider deployment, updates, and operations by design. ● Everything as code ● Structured CI/CD pipelines ● Shared libraries of common tools and templates ● Obsessive observability – data, data, data! Empower yourself to act quickly during incidents.
- 27. Focus: Preparation Operational Readiness Technology is important, but so are process and procedure. ● Accurate documentation – checklists, runbooks, and playbooks ● Trained, right-sized team… no shortcuts! ● Governance to control readiness Codify process and procedure with AWS: resource tags, event triggers, AWS Systems Manager Run Command, Lambda, CloudWatch Events, etc.
- 28. Question Does your operations team have documented procedures?
- 29. Focus: Operation Understanding Operational Health Operational excellence requires immediately available, accurate insight into key metrics that are aligned with business requirements. ● Performance, cost, availability, latency, etc. ● Collect and aggregate data ● Implement dashboards and alerting AWS provides CloudWatch, Amazon ElasticSearch with Kibana, and many other tools to enable your understanding of operational health.
- 30. Focus: Operation Responding to Events Armed with key metrics, alerting, and dashboards, your team can respond to events with confidence. ● Consider business impact when prioritizing ● Script responses through operations as code, leveraging data ● Implement automated rollbacks to known good versions ● Embrace AWS auto-scaling After navigating an incident, always perform root cause analysis and a full post-mortem.
- 31. Focus: Evolution Learning from Experience The greatest indicator of success for ops teams? A passion for learning. ● Every incident is an opportunity ● Encourage ops teams to analyze, experiment, and improve ● AWS provides extensive platform to enable Be sure to pull in all parts of the business to add differing points of view, surfacing new opportunities for improvement.
- 32. Question How does your organization view operational events?
- 33. Focus: Evolution Share Learnings Many companies have multiple product and operations teams. Share your lessons broadly to drive a culture of improvement. ● Leverage AWS platform for sharing best practices, such as CloudFormation templates, Chef Cookbooks, and Lambda functions. ● Use AWS IAM to define permissions for controlled access. Evolution isn’t a localized process.
- 34. Summary AWS WAF is a powerful collection of best practices WAF Program Partners like Reliam can help accelerate your journey Operational Excellence Pillar ● Design Principles ● Focus Areas ○ Preparation ○ Operation ○ Evolution