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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
Implement practices to improve code quality
Implementing Practices to Improve Code Quality
Implementing effective practices to improve code quality helps minimize defects and ensures the development of maintainable, efficient, and reliable software. Practices such as test-driven development (TDD), code reviews, standards adoption, and pair programming can significantly enhance the quality of the codebase. Integrating these practices into the continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) process ensures that quality is a constant focus throughout the software lifecycle.
Test-Driven Development (TDD)
Implement test-driven development to improve code quality by writing tests before writing the actual code. TDD ensures that new features and changes are fully tested from the beginning. By writing tests first, developers are encouraged to write more modular, testable code, leading to fewer defects and easier maintenance.
Conduct Code Reviews
Perform regular code reviews to ensure that code changes adhere to best practices and standards. Code reviews provide an opportunity for peers to identify defects, suggest improvements, and share knowledge. Code reviews also promote accountability and help enforce consistency across the codebase, reducing the risk of errors.
Adopt Coding Standards
Adopt and enforce coding standards to ensure consistency and quality across the codebase. Coding standards define best practices for naming conventions, formatting, error handling, and more. Adopting standards helps make the code more readable, maintainable, and less prone to errors. Using automated linters to enforce standards helps streamline the process.
Pair Programming
Use pair programming to enhance code quality by having two developers work together at the same workstation. This practice enables continuous code review, real-time knowledge sharing, and the early identification of defects. Pair programming can lead to improved problem-solving and ensures that more than one person understands the code being developed.
Integrate Quality Practices into CI/CD
Incorporate code quality practices into the CI/CD pipeline to ensure that every change is validated automatically. This includes automated testing, static code analysis, and other quality checks. Integrating quality practices into CI/CD helps catch defects early, reduces manual intervention, and maintains a high-quality codebase as changes are deployed continuously.
Supporting Questions
- What practices are used to improve code quality and minimize defects?
- How are code quality practices integrated into the CI/CD pipeline?
- How do coding standards and code reviews contribute to the consistency of the codebase?
Roles and Responsibilities
Developer
Responsibilities:
- Write tests before implementing features as part of test-driven development (TDD).
- Follow coding standards and participate in pair programming to enhance code quality.
Code Reviewer
Responsibilities:
- Conduct code reviews to identify defects, suggest improvements, and ensure adherence to coding standards.
- Collaborate with developers to resolve any issues identified during reviews.
DevOps Engineer
Responsibilities:
- Integrate quality practices, such as automated testing and static analysis, into the CI/CD pipeline.
- Ensure that code quality checks are automated and run consistently on all changes before they are deployed.
Artifacts
- Code Review Checklist: A checklist used during code reviews to ensure best practices, consistency, and adherence to coding standards.
- Coding Standards Document: A document outlining the coding standards adopted by the team, including naming conventions, formatting, and error handling guidelines.
- Quality Gate Report: A report generated from CI/CD pipelines that shows the results of quality checks, such as unit test coverage, static analysis, and code quality metrics.
Relevant AWS Tools
Testing and Analysis Tools
- AWS CodeBuild: Automates the process of running tests and analyzing code quality, ensuring that code changes are validated as part of the CI/CD process.
- AWS CodeGuru Reviewer: Uses machine learning to provide recommendations on improving code quality, identifying bugs, and optimizing performance during the code review process.
Code Review and Collaboration Tools
- AWS CodeCommit: Hosts code repositories, enabling teams to perform code reviews, comment on changes, and collaborate effectively.
- Amazon Chime: Facilitates real-time communication for pair programming sessions or collaborative discussions during code reviews.
CI/CD Integration Tools
- AWS CodePipeline: Integrates automated testing, static code analysis, and quality checks into the CI/CD process, ensuring that code quality practices are enforced consistently.
- AWS CodeDeploy: Deploys validated code to production environments, ensuring that only code that has passed quality checks is promoted.