Automate healing on all layers

Workloads that require high availability must implement strategies to handle component failures automatically. By automating healing processes, you can guarantee quicker recovery and minimal disruption, essential for user satisfaction and maintaining service level agreements (SLAs).

Best Practices

Implement Automated Monitoring and Alerts

• Use AWS CloudWatch to monitor application performance and system metrics in real time.
• Set up alarms to detect anomalies that may indicate a failure or performance degradation.
• Integrate with AWS Lambda to trigger automated remediation actions upon alarm performance.

Enable Auto Recovery for EC2 Instances

• Use EC2 Auto Recovery to automatically recover instances when impairment is detected due to hardware failure.
• Leverage Amazon EC2 health checks to ensure that non-responsive instances are identified correctly.
• Combine with Auto Scaling to ensure that healthy instances can replace any that fail.

Utilize Managed Services with Built-in Resilience

• Leverage AWS managed services such as RDS, DynamoDB, and ECS, which include automatic failover and recovery features.
• Ensure that your architecture focuses on microservices that can individually scale and be independently updated.
• Evaluate which components can benefit from AWS Fault Isolation options to reduce the impact of a failure.

Establish Automated Backup and Restore Procedures

• Use AWS Backup to automate backup schedules across services, ensuring data protection and retention policies are adhered to.
• Regularly test your restoration processes to ensure they function as expected during an actual incident.
• Integrate AWS CloudFormation or infrastructure as code (IaC) scripts into the backup lifecycle to redeploy infrastructure when necessary.

Implement Blue/Green Deployments or Canary Releases

• Use deployment strategies such as blue/green or canary to minimize downtime and reduce the impact of failed deployments.
• Automate the rollback process using tools like AWS CodeDeploy when a failure in the new version is detected.
• Monitor application metrics closely during the deployment to facilitate quick remediation if issues arise.

Questions to ask your team

• What automated processes are in place to detect and respond to component failures?
• How are healing actions initiated upon failure detection, and what systems are involved?
• Can you provide examples of recent incidents where automated healing successfully mitigated downtime?
• Is there a documented procedure for the types of failures that the automation can handle?
• How often are the automated recovery mechanisms tested to ensure they function as expected?
• Are there metrics collected related to the effectiveness of the automated healing processes?
• How is the team notified of incidents where automated healing was triggered?
• What mechanisms are in place to continuously improve the automation based on past incidents?

Who should be doing this?

Cloud Architect

• Design resilient architectures that incorporate healing mechanisms.
• Select appropriate AWS services that support automated healing.
• Establish redundancy and failover strategies for critical components.

DevOps Engineer

• Implement automated scripts for monitoring and healing of workloads.
• Configure AWS services for auto-recovery and self-healing.
• Continuously test and validate healing processes to ensure effectiveness.

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

• Monitor system performance and detect failures in real-time.
• Analyze failure patterns to improve automated healing strategies.
• Collaborate with development teams to integrate healing features into applications.

Systems Administrator

• Manage and maintain infrastructure resources, ensuring they support automated healing.
• Respond to alerts and adjust healing policies as necessary.
• Document processes related to automated recovery and system healing.

What evidence shows this is happening in your organization?

• Automated Healing Playbook: A comprehensive guide that outlines procedures and best practices for implementing automated healing mechanisms across all layers of the workload, ensuring rapid recovery from component failures.
• Incident Response and Remediation Plan: A structured plan detailing the steps to detect failures, trigger automated remediation actions, and manage incidents to minimize downtime and improve MTTR.
• Reliability Dashboard: An interactive dashboard that visualizes real-time metrics related to workload health, failure incidents, and automated recovery actions, allowing teams to quickly assess and respond to reliability issues.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Template: A template that demonstrates how to provision resilient infrastructure with automated healing capabilities, such as AWS CloudFormation or Terraform scripts that include health checks and auto-recovery configurations.
• Best Practices Checklist for Automated Healing: A checklist of actionable items to assess and improve the automated healing capabilities of the workload, ensuring all layers are capable of recovering from failures.

Cloud Services

AWS

• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling: Automates the scaling of EC2 instances based on current demand and health checks, enhancing the workload’s reliability.
• AWS Lambda: Can be used to trigger automated responses to failures, such as restarting services or notifying stakeholders.
• Amazon CloudWatch: Monitors the health of AWS resources and applications, enabling automated actions to remediate issues promptly.