Operational excellence
The Operational Excellence Pillar provides guidance on running and monitoring systems to deliver customer value and continually improving the supporting processes and procedures. The pillar also provides an overview of design principles, best practices, and questions. You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Operational Excellence Pillar whitepaper.
At AWS, operational excellence is defined as a commitment to build software correctly while consistently delivering a great customer experience. It contains best practices for organising your team, designing your workload, operating it at scale, and evolving it over time. Operational excellence focuses your team more on building new features that benefit customers and less on maintenance and firefighting. We look to best practices that result in well-running systems, a balanced workload for you and your team, and most importantly, a great customer experience.
The goal of operational excellence is to get new features and bug fixes into customers' hands quickly and reliably. Organisations that invest in operational excellence consistently delight customers while building new features, making changes, and dealing with failures. Along the way, operational excellence drives towards continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) by helping developers achieve high quality results consistently.
Design principles
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Perform operations as code: In the cloud, you can apply the same engineering discipline that you use for application code to your entire environment. You can define your entire workload (applications, infrastructure, etc.) as code and update it with code. You can script your operations procedures and automate their process by launching them in response to events. By performing operations as code, you limit human error and create consistent responses to events.
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Make frequent, small, reversible changes: Design workloads that are scalable and loosely coupled to permit components to be updated regularly. Automated deployment techniques together with smaller, incremental changes reduces the blast radius and allows for faster reversal when failures occur. This increases confidence to deliver beneficial changes to your workload while maintaining quality and adapting quickly to changes in market conditions.
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Refine operations procedures frequently: As you evolve your workloads, evolve your operations appropriately. As you use operations procedures, look for opportunities to improve them. Hold regular reviews and validate that all procedures are effective and that teams are familiar with them. Where gaps are identified, update procedures accordingly. Communicate procedural updates to all stakeholders and teams. Gamify your operations to share best practices and educate teams.
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Anticipate failure: Perform "pre-mortem" exercises to identify potential sources of failure so that they can be removed or mitigated. Test your failure scenarios and validate your understanding of their impact. Test your response procedures to ensure they are effective and that teams are familiar with their process. Set up regular game days to test workload and team responses to simulated events.
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Learn from all operational failures: Drive improvement through lessons learned from all operational events and failures. Share what is learned across teams and through the entire organisation.
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Use managed services: Reduce operational burden by using AWS managed services where possible. Build operational procedures around interactions with those services.
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Implement observability for actionable insights: Gain a comprehensive understanding of workload behavior, performance, reliability, cost, and health. Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and leverage observability telemetry to make informed decisions and take prompt action when business outcomes are at risk. Proactively improve performance, reliability, and cost based on actionable observability data.
While operational excellence design principles are focused on digital workloads, their wider objective is to help an organisation improve its operational capability. The following specific questions are intended to identify areas of improvements to an organisation's operational practices with respect to Māori data.
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