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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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Operations activities have identified owners responsible for their performance
PostedNovember 6, 2024
UpdatedNovember 11, 2024
ByKevin McCaffrey
To ensure effective operations, it is crucial to assign owners to specific operational activities and clarify their responsibilities. Each workload should have a designated individual or team responsible for its operational performance, with well-defined roles to conduct activities, validate outcomes, and communicate findings. This clarity minimizes ambiguity, improves accountability, and enhances the performance of operations.
Identify Ownership of Specific Activities
Identify and assign ownership for specific operational activities, such as monitoring, backups, incident response, or patch management. Define responsibilities for each activity, including who will perform it, how it will be validated, and who will provide feedback to stakeholders. This ensures that each workload is consistently managed and properly supported.
Define the “Why” Behind Responsibilities
Clarify the rationale for assigning responsibilities. Understanding why a specific owner is responsible for a workload informs accountability and aligns activities with individual or team expertise. This ensures that the right individuals are responsible for relevant operational tasks, leading to more effective and efficient outcomes.
Establish Clear Performance Metrics
Establish performance metrics for each operational activity to evaluate whether responsibilities are being fulfilled effectively. Metrics provide insight into the performance of owners in meeting defined goals, while also allowing teams to identify areas of improvement. Use these metrics to evaluate outcomes and provide feedback.
Validate Activities and Provide Feedback
Establish processes for validating operational activities to ensure they meet expected standards. Owners should validate their work and receive feedback from other stakeholders to ensure continuous improvement. Establishing regular reviews of operational activities helps enhance the efficiency and reliability of workloads.
Supporting Questions
- How are responsibilities for operational activities assigned to individual owners or teams?
- How are activities validated to ensure they meet the required performance standards?
- What mechanisms exist for providing feedback on operational activities and their results?
Roles and Responsibilities
Operations Owner
Responsibilities:
- Execute specific operational activities for assigned workloads, such as monitoring, patching, or backups.
- Validate outcomes against operational standards and maintain consistency across activities.
Quality Assurance Specialist
Responsibilities:
- Validate the work conducted by Operations Owners and ensure it meets the defined operational standards.
- Provide feedback to Operations Owners to help improve the quality of operations.
Feedback Coordinator
Responsibilities:
- Collect feedback on operational performance from various stakeholders.
- Share actionable insights with Operations Owners to support continuous improvement.
Artifacts
- Operations Activity Ownership Matrix: A document outlining each operational activity, the responsible owner, and any supporting team members.
- Operational Performance Metrics Report: A report showing how effectively operational activities have been executed and validated.
- Feedback Log: A log to track feedback provided to operational owners, along with actions taken based on feedback.
Relevant AWS Tools
Operational Monitoring and Validation Tools
- AWS CloudWatch: Provides metrics and logging to help monitor workload operations, supporting validation and performance assessment.
- AWS Config: Tracks configuration changes to resources, providing a means for operational owners to validate that resources comply with operational standards.
Operational Management Tools
- AWS Systems Manager: Facilitates central operational activity management, such as patching and troubleshooting, supporting defined owners in managing workloads.
- AWS Trusted Advisor: Provides best practices and recommendations for operational efficiency, allowing operational owners to validate workloads against AWS guidelines and take necessary actions.
Feedback and Continuous Improvement
- AWS Chatbot: Helps in real-time monitoring and getting operational updates, which can be useful for feedback loops with Operations Owners.
- AWS Personal Health Dashboard: Keeps operational owners informed about events that may impact workloads, helping in the timely response and validation of activities.
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