AWS encourages all users to follow their Well-Architected Framework. Consisting of five pillars, it’s designed to help customers apply best practices in AWS environments.
The first pillar is Operational Excellence and concerns the ability to run workloads effectively, gain insight into your operations and continuously improve processes to deliver value. Without this pillar, your infrastructure is prone to vulnerabilities.
In this blog, we explore the five design principles of operational excellence and what they mean for your business.
- Perform operations as code
You can define your entire workload as code in the cloud. This includes your applications and infrastructure, minimising human error.
You can also update applications through code and automate procedures so that you’re more consistent when it comes to responding to events. This saves your developers time and allows them more resources to focus on business development.
- Make small, reversible changes
Making big changes in the cloud can be fatal. Which is why AWS encourages you to make small changes that can be reversed the moment customers start experiencing disruption or downtime.
Likewise, your workloads should be designed to allow components to be updated regularly. This way, you’ll be able to pinpoint what change has caused the problem as soon as it occurs.
- Refine procedures
As you begin to automate more procedures, it’s important that you regularly return to and improve them. After all, you won’t be able to modernise your applications or other workloads without first evolving your processes.
To do this is simple. Start by asking your team to set aside days where you can review and validate all the procedures. Next, check all processes are still effective. And finally, strategise how they can be optimised.
- Anticipate failure
If all your processes seem to be working as intended, try to find potential sources of failure so you can mitigate against them. Any threats or vulnerabilities need to be eliminated in order to achieve operational excellence.
Test these potential scenarios out, and validate your understanding of their impact. Create response procedures to address these situations and test that these procedures are also effective.
- Learn from operational mistakes
All failures that you’ve recognised should promote change within your organisation. Implement the responsive procedures that were proven to work and share this information with your team.
This needs to be a recurring process too. Only by regularly reviewing your policies will you be able to truly improve them.
How we ensure operational excellence
At ClearCloud, we teach your team best practice and use IaC as standard. Whether you’re yet to migrate or struggling to get the most out of your current set-up, we instill the Well-Architected Framework into your personnel and train them to be architects in their own right.
So, if you’re interested in achieving operational excellence, speak to a member of the team today.
