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Operational Excellence
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- Resources have identified owners
- Processes and procedures have identified owners
- Operations activities have identified owners responsible for their performance
- Team members know what they are responsible for
- Mechanisms exist to identify responsibility and ownership
- Mechanisms exist to request additions, changes, and exceptions
- Responsibilities between teams are predefined or negotiated
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- Executive Sponsorship
- Team members are empowered to take action when outcomes are at risk
- Escalation is encouraged
- Communications are timely, clear, and actionable
- Experimentation is encouraged
- Team members are encouraged to maintain and grow their skill sets
- Resource teams appropriately
- Diverse opinions are encouraged and sought within and across teams
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- Use version control
- Test and validate changes
- Use configuration management systems
- Use build and deployment management systems
- Perform patch management
- Implement practices to improve code quality
- Share design standards
- Use multiple environments
- Make frequent, small, reversible changes
- Fully automate integration and deployment
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Security
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- Evaluate and implement new security services and features regularly
- Automate testing and validation of security controls in pipelines
- Identify and prioritize risks using a threat model
- Keep up-to-date with security recommendations
- Keep up-to-date with security threats
- Identify and validate control objectives
- Secure account root user and properties
- Separate workloads using accounts
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- Analyze public and cross-account access
- Manage access based on life cycle
- Share resources securely with a third party
- Reduce permissions continuously
- Share resources securely within your organization
- Establish emergency access process
- Define permission guardrails for your organization
- Grant least privilege access
- Define access requirements
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- Build a program that embeds security ownership in workload teams
- Centralize services for packages and dependencies
- Manual code reviews
- Automate testing throughout the development and release lifecycle
- Train for application security
- Regularly assess security properties of the pipelines
- Deploy software programmatically
- Perform regular penetration testing
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Reliability
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- How do you ensure sufficient gap between quotas and maximum usage to accommodate failover?
- How do you automate quota management?
- How do you monitor and manage service quotas?
- How do you accommodate fixed service quotas and constraints through architecture?
- How do you manage service quotas and constraints across accounts and Regions?
- How do you manage service quotas and constraints?
- How do you build a program that embeds reliability into workload teams?
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- How do you enforce non-overlapping private IP address ranges in all private address spaces?
- How do you prefer hub-and-spoke topologies over many-to-many mesh?
- How do you ensure IP subnet allocation accounts for expansion and availability?
- How do you provision redundant connectivity between private networks in the cloud and on-premises environments?
- How do you use highly available network connectivity for workload public endpoints?
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- Monitor end-to-end tracing of requests through your system
- Conduct reviews regularly
- Analytics
- Automate responses (Real-time processing and alarming)
- Send notifications (Real-time processing and alarming)
- Define and calculate metrics (Aggregation)
- Monitor End-to-End Tracing of Requests Through Your System
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- Monitor all components of the workload to detect failures
- Fail over to healthy resources
- Automate healing on all layers
- Rely on the data plane and not the control plane during recovery
- Use static stability to prevent bimodal behavior
- Send notifications when events impact availability
- Architect your product to meet availability targets and uptime service level agreements (SLAs)
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Cost Optimization
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- Establish ownership of cost optimization
- Establish a partnership between finance and technology
- Establish cloud budgets and forecasts
- Implement cost awareness in your organizational processes
- Monitor cost proactively
- Keep up-to-date with new service releases
- Quantify business value from cost optimization
- Report and notify on cost optimization
- Create a cost-aware culture
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- Perform cost analysis for different usage over time
- Analyze all components of this workload
- Perform a thorough analysis of each component
- Select components of this workload to optimize cost in line with organization priorities
- Perform cost analysis for different usage over time
- Select software with cost effective licensing
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Performance
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- Learn about and understand available cloud services and features
- Evaluate how trade-offs impact customers and architecture efficiency
- Use guidance from your cloud provider or an appropriate partner to learn about architecture patterns and best practices
- Factor cost into architectural decisions
- Use policies and reference architectures
- Use benchmarking to drive architectural decisions
- Use a data-driven approach for architectural choices
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- Use purpose-built data store that best support your data access and storage requirements
- Collect and record data store performance metrics
- Evaluate available configuration options for data store
- Implement Strategies to Improve Query Performance in Data Store
- Implement data access patterns that utilize caching
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- Understand how networking impacts performance
- Evaluate available networking features
- Choose appropriate dedicated connectivity or VPN for your workload
- Use load balancing to distribute traffic across multiple resources
- Choose network protocols to improve performance
- Choose your workload's location based on network requirements
- Optimize network configuration based on metrics
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- Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure workload health and performance
- Use monitoring solutions to understand the areas where performance is most critical
- Define a process to improve workload performance
- Review metrics at regular intervals
- Load test your workload
- Use automation to proactively remediate performance-related issues
- Keep your workload and services up-to-date
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Sustainability
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- Optimize geographic placement of workloads based on their networking requirements
- Align SLAs with sustainability goals
- Optimize geographic placement of workloads based on their networking requirements
- Stop the creation and maintenance of unused assets
- Optimize team member resources for activities performed
- Implement buffering or throttling to flatten the demand curve
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- Optimize software and architecture for asynchronous and scheduled jobs
- Remove or refactor workload components with low or no use
- Optimize areas of code that consume the most time or resources
- Optimize impact on devices and equipment
- Use software patterns and architectures that best support data access and storage patterns
- Remove unneeded or redundant data
- Use technologies that support data access and storage patterns
- Use policies to manage the lifecycle of your datasets
- Use shared file systems or storage to access common data
- Back up data only when difficult to recreate
- Use elasticity and automation to expand block storage or file system
- Minimize data movement across networks
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- Articles coming soon
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Conduct game days regularly
PostedDecember 20, 2024
UpdatedDecember 20, 2024
ByKevin McCaffrey
Conducting game days is essential for validating the reliability of your workload. It allows your team to simulate failure scenarios and ensures that the system behaves as expected under stress, thereby reinforcing confidence in your operational procedures.
Best Practices
- Schedule Regular Game Days: Plan and conduct game days at regular intervals. This keeps the team familiar with emergency protocols and allows for continuous improvement of incident response based on previous experiences.
- Simulate Real-World Scenarios: Design game day exercises that closely mimic actual production failures. This will help your team practice effective response strategies and adapt to real-time challenges.
- Involve All Relevant Teams: Ensure that all teams involved in the operation of the system participate in game days. This enhances collective knowledge and prepares everyone for cross-functional collaboration during actual incidents.
Supporting Questions
- Are your teams trained in the procedures developed during game days?
- How often are game days conducted, and are they effective in achieving their objectives?
Roles and Responsibilities
- Incident Response Team: This team is responsible for planning and executing game day exercises, ensuring all necessary stakeholders participate and learn from each simulation.
- DevOps Engineers: DevOps engineers should actively engage in game days to test system changes and validate recovery procedures, thereby directly contributing to the system’s reliability.
Artifacts
- Game Day Playbook: A comprehensive document that outlines all exercises, scenarios, and procedures for game day events. This ensures consistency and provides a reference for team members.
- Post-Mortem Reports: After each game day, it’s crucial to document lessons learned and gather feedback. These reports help in refining strategies for future incidents.
Cloud Services
AWS
- AWS CloudFormation: Use AWS CloudFormation to script and automate your infrastructure changes so that game day simulations can be rapidly deployed and reverted.
- AWS Lambda: Leverage AWS Lambda to automate responses to triggered events during game days, allowing for testing of serverless architecture reliability.
- Amazon SNS: Utilize Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) to simulate alert mechanisms and notification strategies during game day exercises, ensuring communication remains effective during incidents.
Question: How do you test reliability?
Pillar: Reliability (Code: REL)
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