Operational Excellence Pillar - AWS Well-Architected Framework

Publication date: October 3, 2023 (Document revisions)

The focus of this paper is the operational excellence pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It provides guidance to help you apply best practices in the design, delivery, and maintenance of AWS workloads.

Introduction

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand the benefits and risks of decisions you make while building workloads on AWS. By using the Framework you will learn operational and architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable workloads in the cloud. It provides a way to consistently measure your operations and architectures against best practices and identify areas for improvement. We believe that having Well-Architected workloads that are designed with operations in mind greatly increases the likelihood of business success.

The framework is based on six pillars:

• Operational Excellence

• Security

• Reliability

• Performance Efficiency

• Cost Optimization

• Sustainability

This paper focuses on the operational excellence pillar and how to apply it as the foundation of your well-architected solutions. Operational excellence is challenging to achieve in environments where operations is perceived as a function isolated and distinct from the lines of business and development teams that it supports. By adopting the practices in this paper you can build architectures that provide insight to their status, are activated for effective and efficient operation and event response, and can continue to improve and support your business goals.

This paper is intended for those in technology roles, such as chief technology officers (CTOs), architects, developers, and operations team members. After reading this paper, you will understand AWS best practices and the strategies to use when designing cloud architectures for operational excellence. This paper does not provide implementation details or architectural patterns. However, it does include references to appropriate resources for this information.