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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 application telemetry
Implementing Application Telemetry for Observability
Application telemetry is the foundation for understanding the state of your workload and making informed decisions to align with both technical and business outcomes. By emitting telemetry data, you gain actionable insights into system health, user behavior, and the overall performance of your application. Application telemetry supports activities such as troubleshooting, performance optimization, and measuring the impact of new features.
Emit Actionable Telemetry Data
Ensure that your application emits telemetry data that is actionable and provides insight into its state. This includes metrics such as response times, error rates, user activity, and resource utilization. Actionable telemetry helps identify potential issues and areas for improvement, providing the basis for data-driven decision-making.
Align Telemetry with Business and Technical Outcomes
Align telemetry with business key performance indicators (KPIs) and technical outcomes. Defining telemetry that reflects both technical metrics (such as system health) and business metrics (such as feature adoption) allows you to measure the success of your workload in meeting organizational goals. This alignment ensures that telemetry data is not only relevant but also valuable for guiding the evolution of your workload.
Leverage Telemetry for Troubleshooting
Use telemetry data for troubleshooting and identifying the root cause of incidents. When issues arise, application telemetry provides the data needed to understand where the problem originated and how it is affecting the workload. This reduces the time spent in diagnosing problems and allows for quicker remediation.
Measure Impact of New Features
Implement telemetry to measure the impact of new features on both system performance and business outcomes. Feature-specific telemetry helps evaluate whether a new feature is functioning as intended and whether it contributes positively to user satisfaction and business objectives. This feedback loop allows teams to adjust or improve features based on real-world data.
Use Telemetry for Continuous Improvement
Utilize telemetry data to continuously improve workload performance, reliability, and efficiency. By regularly analyzing telemetry data, teams can identify trends, detect anomalies, and take action to optimize the application. This helps ensure that your workload remains aligned with both user needs and business goals as it evolves.
Supporting Questions
- What telemetry data is emitted by the application, and how does it provide actionable insights?
- How is application telemetry aligned with both technical and business outcomes?
- How is telemetry data used to support troubleshooting and continuous improvement?
Roles and Responsibilities
Application Developer
Responsibilities:
- Implement telemetry in the application to emit data that provides insights into system health and user interactions.
- Ensure telemetry is aligned with both technical and business outcomes, capturing relevant metrics.
Operations Analyst
Responsibilities:
- Monitor telemetry data to detect anomalies and identify opportunities for improvement.
- Use telemetry data for troubleshooting and root cause analysis during incidents.
Product Owner
Responsibilities:
- Define key metrics to be captured in telemetry that align with business objectives.
- Use telemetry data to evaluate the impact of new features and inform product decisions.
Artifacts
- Telemetry Implementation Plan: A plan detailing the metrics and telemetry to be implemented in the application, including business and technical KPIs.
- Telemetry Dashboard: A visual representation of telemetry data, providing insights into system health, performance, and user activity.
- Troubleshooting Log: A log capturing incidents, root causes, and actions taken, using telemetry data to inform resolution.
Relevant AWS Tools
Monitoring and Logging Tools
- Amazon CloudWatch: Collects and monitors telemetry data, providing metrics, dashboards, and alerts to help maintain workload observability.
- AWS X-Ray: Implements tracing to capture insights into how requests flow through your application, providing a deeper understanding of system performance.
Data Analysis and Visualization Tools
- Amazon QuickSight: Visualizes telemetry data, allowing teams to analyze trends and monitor KPIs that reflect both technical and business outcomes.
- Amazon Managed Grafana: Integrates with CloudWatch to create dashboards that visualize telemetry data, helping teams track workload performance in real time.
Logging Tools
- AWS CloudTrail: Provides logs of API calls, helping to correlate telemetry data with system actions for improved troubleshooting.
- Amazon CloudWatch Logs: Centralizes logs from different parts of the application, supporting detailed analysis and troubleshooting activities.