AWS Well-Architected Framework: Operational Excellence

You made it to the last blog post in the AWS Well-Architected Framework Series! Thank you for sticking around. In our previous post, we took a tour on the Performance Efficiency Pillar. Previously, we touched on the Security, Cost-Optimization and Reliability Pillar.

This blog post aims at roofing the building by giving insights into the Operational Excellence Architecture with best practices and tips on how to build an Operational Excellent Cloud Architecture. The Operational Excellence Architecture focuses on running, monitoring systems, and continually improving processes and procedures.

Why Should You Build An Operational Excellent Cloud Architecture?
Building an operational excellence cloud architecture can benefit you in a variety of ways. It can enable you to scale your operations quickly and cost-effectively, increase agility, simplify management and troubleshooting, and reduce downtime. It can also reduce workloads and costs associated with maintenance, upgrades, and deployments. Additionally, it can help organisations to streamline their IT operations and ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations.

The Operational Excellence Pillar
The AWS Operational Excellence Pillar is a set of best practices and processes that help businesses ensure their AWS resources are running optimally, securely, and cost-effectively. The framework covers everything from architecture security, and compliance, to monitoring and performance, to change and release management. It provides guidance on how to manage and optimise AWS resources to achieve the best results. The Operational Excellence pillar gives you the ability to support development and run workloads effectively, gain insight into your operation on the cloud and continuously improves supporting processes and procedures to deliver business value.

Principles For Operational Excellence In The Cloud:

• Perform Operations As Code: This means automating routine tasks and processes with programmatic code. This can include automating the provisioning and configuration of cloud resources, deploying and managing applications, and performing data analysis and reporting. This type of automation allows organisations to reduce the time and effort spent on manual processes and increase the efficiency of their cloud operations.
• Make Frequent, Small, Reversible Changes: This means making changes on an ongoing basis that are not too disruptive, can easily be reversed or undone if needed, and are not too large for the cloud infrastructure to handle. This approach allows for continuous improvement and innovation on the cloud architecture, while also ensuring that any changes made do not cause any major disruption. This approach also allows for a more agile development process, as changes can be made quickly and easily tested before being implemented.
• Refine Operations Procedures Frequently: This means to continuously update and optimise the operational procedures that are stored in your cloud architecture. This also involves making changes to the steps involved in the procedures and ensuring that they are up-to-date with the current technology and best practices. This can include making changes to the processes, updating the software, or introducing new ideas to the workflow.
• Anticipate Failure: The cloud is a volatile environment which means you should be prepared for the unexpected to happen but at the same time, have a failsafe plan. Anticipating Failure in your cloud architecture means preparing for any potential problems that could arise when using your cloud architecture. This includes planning for system outages, data loss, security breaches, and other unexpected issues.
• Have Frequent Architecture Review: Learning from all operational failures in the cloud means taking the time to analyse and understand why a particular cloud-based operation failed, and using that knowledge to inform future decisions and strategies. This can involve reviewing log files, system metrics, and other data to identify potential root causes of failure and then implementing changes to prevent similar issues in the future. It is important to learn from operational failures in the cloud to ensure reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency.

Best Practices Of The Operational Excellence Pillar

• Automate processes and procedures: Automating processes and procedures can help improve efficiency, reduce risk, and increase the reliability of your systems.
• Monitor systems to detect and resolve issues quickly: Monitoring systems can help you identify and resolve issues quickly, which can help improve the overall reliability and performance of your systems.
• Continuously improve processes and procedures: It is important to continuously review and improve processes and procedures to increase efficiency and reduce risk. This can be done through regular reviews and by implementing feedback from stakeholders.
• Use alarms to detect and recover from failures: Alarms can help you detect and recover from failures quickly, which can help improve the reliability of your systems. Implement recovery procedures: Having well-defined recovery procedures in place can help you quickly recover from failures and minimize downtime.
• Use change management processes: Implementing change management processes can help you make changes to your systems in a controlled and reliable manner.

How To Build An Operational Excellent Cloud Architecture

1. Define your operational goals: It is important to clearly define your operational goals and objectives, such as performance, reliability, security, and cost-effectiveness.
2. Identify operational requirements: Next, you will need to identify the operational requirements for your architecture, such as monitoring, alerting, backup and recovery, and change management.
3. Design for operational excellence: When designing your architecture, consider how you can meet your operational goals and requirements. This may involve choosing the right AWS services and features, designing for scalability and reliability, and implementing monitoring and alerting systems.
4. Implement and test your architecture: Once you have designed your architecture, you will need to implement and test it to ensure that it meets your operational goals and requirements.
5. Monitor and optimize your architecture: Ongoing monitoring and optimization of your architecture is important to ensure that it continues to meet your operational goals and requirements. This may involve reviewing and improving processes and procedures, and making changes to the architecture as needed.

Wendu And Operational Excellence
Following the best practices and principles of each of the pillars, a continuous monitoring of your operational goals is paramount to achieving this last pillar of the AWS well architected framework. Having a governing structure within your organisation that ensures the same data is being reviewed continuously across the organization will help your organization ‘s cloud operations be more excellent.

With Wendu’s multi-user / multi-account capability where all required users can have access to the same security, cost, and architecture insights of the organisation’s single or multiple cloud environments; ensuring that the same operational goals in terms of security, cost, performance, and reliability that had been set at the beginning is being well adhered to.

Learn more about Wendu here, and you can also request a demo to see Wendu in action.