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Operational Excellence

The Operational Excellence pillar includes the ability to support development and run workloads effectively, gain insight into their operations, and continuously improve supporting processes and procedures to deliver business value.

Key Areas

The Operational Excellence pillar includes the following key areas:

  • Organization - How teams are structured and how they collaborate
  • Prepare - Design for operations and understand workload health
  • Operate - Understand workload health and achieve operational success
  • Evolve - Learn, share, and continuously improve

Questions

OPS01 6 best practices
How do you determine what your priorities are?
BP01 Evaluate external customer needs BP02 Evaluate internal customer needs BP03 Evaluate governance requirements BP04 Evaluate compliance requirements BP05 Evaluate threat landscape BP06 Evaluate tradeoffs while managing benefits and risks
OPS02 6 best practices
How do you structure your organization to support your business outcomes?
BP01 Resources have identified owners BP02 Processes and procedures have identified owners BP03 Operations activities have identified owners responsible for their performance BP04 Mechanisms exist to manage responsibilities and ownership BP05 Mechanisms exist to request additions, changes, and exceptions BP06 Responsibilities between teams are predefined or negotiated
OPS03 7 best practices
How does your organizational culture support your business outcomes?
BP01 Provide executive sponsorship BP02 Team members are empowered to take action when outcomes are at risk BP03 Escalation is encouraged BP04 Communications are timely, clear, and actionable BP05 Experimentation is encouraged BP06 Team members are encouraged to maintain and grow their skill sets BP07 Resource teams appropriately
OPS04 5 best practices
How do you implement observability in your workload?
BP01 Identify key performance indicators BP02 Implement application telemetry BP03 Implement user experience telemetry BP04 Implement dependency telemetry BP05 Implement distributed tracing
OPS05 10 best practices
How do you reduce defects, ease remediation, and improve flow into production?
BP01 Use version control BP02 Test and validate changes BP03 Use configuration management systems BP04 Use build and deployment management systems BP05 Perform patch management BP06 Share design standards BP07 Implement practices to improve code quality BP08 Use multiple environments BP09 Make frequent, small, reversible changes BP10 Fully automate integration and deployment
OPS06 4 best practices
How do you mitigate deployment risks?
BP01 Plan for unsuccessful changes BP02 Test deployments BP03 Employ safe deployment strategies BP04 Automate testing and rollback
OPS07 6 best practices
How do you know that you are ready to support a workload?
BP01 Ensure personnel capability BP02 Ensure a consistent review of operational readiness BP03 Use runbooks to perform procedures BP04 Use playbooks to investigate issues BP05 Make informed decisions to deploy systems and changes BP06 Create support plans for production workloads
OPS08 5 best practices
How do you understand the health of your workload?
BP01 Analyze workload metrics BP02 Analyze workload logs BP03 Analyze workload traces BP04 Create actionable alerts BP05 Create dashboards
OPS09 3 best practices
How do you understand the health of your operations?
BP01 Measure operations goals and KPIs with metrics BP02 Communicate status and trends to ensure visibility into operation BP03 Review operations metrics and prioritize improvement
OPS10 7 best practices
How do you manage workload and operations events?
BP01 Use a process for event, incident, and problem management BP02 Have a process per alert BP03 Prioritize operational events based on business impact BP04 Define escalation paths BP05 Define a customer communication plan for service-impacting events BP06 Communicate status through dashboards BP07 Automate responses to events
OPS11 9 best practices
How do you evolve operations?
BP01 Have a process for continuous improvement BP02 Perform post-incident analysis BP03 Implement feedback loops BP04 Perform knowledge management BP05 Define drivers for improvement BP06 Validate insights BP07 Perform operations metrics reviews BP08 Document and share lessons learned BP09 Allocate time to make improvements

AWS services for Operational Excellence

AWS CloudFormation

Model, provision, and manage AWS and third-party resources with infrastructure as code.

AWS Systems Manager

Operational hub to view, manage, and automate operations across AWS resources.

Amazon CloudWatch

Observability of your AWS resources and applications through metrics, logs, and alarms.

AWS Config

Assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources.

AWS X-Ray

Analyze and debug distributed applications with end-to-end tracing.

AWS CloudTrail

Track user activity and API usage across your AWS accounts.

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