Evolve
You must learn, share, and continuously improve to sustain operational excellence. Dedicate work cycles to making continuous incremental improvements. Perform post-incident analysis of all customer impacting events. Identify the contributing factors and preventative action to limit or prevent recurrence. Communicate contributing factors with affected communities as appropriate. Regularly evaluate and prioritize opportunities for improvement (for example, feature requests, issue remediation, and compliance requirements), including both the workload and operations procedures.
Include feedback loops within your procedures to rapidly identify areas for improvement and capture learnings from the execution of operations.
Share lessons learned across teams to share the benefits of those lessons. Analyze trends within lessons learned and perform cross-team retrospective analysis of operations metrics to identify opportunities and methods for improvement. Implement changes intended to bring about improvement and evaluate the results to determine success.
On AWS, you can export your log data to Amazon S3 or send logs directly to Amazon S3 for long-term storage. Using AWS Glue, you can discover and prepare your log data in Amazon S3 for analytics, and store associated metadata in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Amazon Athena, through its native integration with AWS Glue, can then be used to analyze your log data, querying it using standard SQL. Using a business intelligence tool like Amazon QuickSight, you can visualize, explore, and analyze your data. Discovering trends and events of interest that may drive improvement.
The following question focuses on these considerations for operational excellence.
| OPS 11: How do you evolve operations? |
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| Dedicate time and resources for continuous incremental improvement to evolve the effectiveness and efficiency of your operations. |
Successful evolution of operations is founded in: frequent small improvements; providing safe environments and time to experiment, develop, and test improvements; and environments in which learning from failures is encouraged. Operations support for sandbox, development, test, and production environments, with increasing level of operational controls, facilitates development and increases the predictability of successful results from changes deployed into production.
