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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
Fully automate integration and deployment
Fully Automating Integration and Deployment
Automating the build, deployment, and testing processes is crucial for ensuring that changes are consistent, reliable, and error-free. Automation reduces the risks associated with manual processes, minimizes human error, and accelerates the process of getting new features and updates into production. A fully automated integration and deployment pipeline allows teams to continuously deliver high-quality software with minimal manual effort.
Automate Build and Integration
Automate the process of building and integrating code changes to ensure that every change is validated consistently. Automated builds reduce the chance of human errors during the compilation and integration stages and ensure that changes from different developers are merged seamlessly. This helps maintain a clean, working codebase and identifies issues earlier in the development cycle.
Automate Testing
Integrate automated testing into the build and deployment pipeline to validate changes before they reach production. Automated tests, such as unit tests, integration tests, security tests, and end-to-end tests, help catch defects early and ensure that changes are safe for deployment. Automated testing reduces the manual effort required for validation and provides continuous assurance that the workload is functioning as expected.
Automate Deployment
Use automated deployment tools to push changes to various environments, such as testing, staging, and production. Automating deployments ensures that code is deployed consistently, following the same steps every time, which minimizes variability and errors. Automated deployments also support rolling updates, blue-green deployments, and other advanced deployment strategies that help maintain workload stability.
Reduce Errors and Manual Effort
Automation reduces the manual effort required to build, test, and deploy changes, allowing teams to focus on higher-value tasks such as feature development and optimization. By eliminating manual steps, automation also reduces the likelihood of errors that can arise from repetitive tasks, resulting in more reliable deployments.
Enable Continuous Delivery
Fully automating integration, testing, and deployment enables continuous delivery of features and updates. With a fully automated pipeline, teams can deliver small, frequent updates that reduce the risk of introducing large changes and provide users with continuous improvements. Continuous delivery ensures that changes are released quickly, while maintaining high levels of quality.
Supporting Questions
- How is the build, testing, and deployment of changes automated?
- What types of tests are integrated into the automated pipeline to validate changes?
- How does automation reduce the effort and errors associated with manual deployments?
Roles and Responsibilities
Build Engineer
Responsibilities:
- Set up and maintain automated build systems to ensure all code changes are integrated and compiled consistently.
- Configure automated build triggers based on version control commits.
QA Engineer
Responsibilities:
- Implement automated tests that are integrated into the CI/CD pipeline to validate each change before deployment.
- Continuously update automated test suites to cover new features and potential defects.
DevOps Engineer
Responsibilities:
- Configure automated deployment pipelines that deploy changes across development, testing, staging, and production environments.
- Use deployment strategies, such as rolling updates or blue-green deployments, to maintain workload stability during deployments.
Artifacts
- Build Automation Script: A script used to automate the build process, ensuring consistent and repeatable compilation and integration of code changes.
- Test Automation Suite: A collection of automated tests, including unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, used to validate changes before deployment.
- Deployment Pipeline Configuration: A configuration document outlining the steps and tools used for fully automating the deployment of changes.
Relevant AWS Tools
Build and Integration Tools
- AWS CodeBuild: Automates the build process, compiling source code, running tests, and producing build artifacts, reducing manual effort and errors.
- AWS CodeCommit: Hosts version-controlled repositories and integrates with build automation tools to trigger builds upon code changes.
Testing Tools
- AWS CodePipeline: Orchestrates the CI/CD process by integrating automated testing tools to validate changes before deployment.
- AWS CodeDeploy: Automates the deployment of applications to Amazon EC2 instances, AWS Fargate, or on-premises servers, ensuring consistent and reliable deployments.
Deployment and Monitoring Tools
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk: Automates the deployment, scaling, and management of applications, abstracting the underlying infrastructure complexity.
- Amazon CloudWatch: Monitors the health and performance of deployments, providing insights to ensure that each release is stable and functions as intended.