Operational Excellence Best Practices - AWS Well-Architected Framework Study Guide

Evaluate:
- Internal and external customer needs
- Threats to the business (liabilities, info security)
- Impact of risks and tradeoffs between approaches
Understand:
- Team members' roles in supporting workload
- Support required to achieve business outcomes
- Team members' roles in the success of other teams (and vice versa)
- Responsibility, ownership, how decisions are made, and who has authority to make decisions
Ensure:
- There are identified owners for each application, workload, platform, and infrastructure component
- Each process and procedure has an identified owner responsible for its definition, and owners responsible for their performance
- Team members have the resources to be successful and scale to support your business outcomes
Define:
- Guidelines or obligations based on organizational governance and external factors, such as regulatory compliance requirements and industry standards
- Responsibilities of team members
- Agreements between teams describing how they work together to support each other and your business outcomes
Ask:
- How do you determine what your priorities are?
- How do you structure your organization to support your business outcomes?
- How does your organizational culture support your business outcomes?

Design your workload to provide information necessary to understand its internal state
Capture a broad set of information to enable situational awareness
Adopt approaches that improve the ﬂow of changes into production and that enable refactoring, fast feedback on quality, and bug fixing
Adopt approaches that provide fast feedback on quality and enable rapid recovery from changes that do not have desired outcomes
Plan for unsuccessful changes so that you are able to respond faster if necessary and test and validate the changes you make
Evaluate the operational readiness of your workload, processes, procedures, and personnel to understand the operational risks related to your workload
Ask:
- How do you design your workload so that you can understand its state?
- How do you reduce defects, ease remediation, and improve flow into production?
- How do you mitigate deployment risks?
- How do you know that you are ready to support a workload?

Define expected outcomes
Identify metrics to measure success
Establish metrics baselines for improvement, investigation, and intervention
Use established runbooks for well-understood events, and use playbooks to aid in investigation and resolution of issues
Communicate operational status of workloads through dashboards and notifications tailored to target audience
Develop scripted responses to well-understood events and automate their performance in response to recognizing the event
Ask:
- How do you understand the health of your workload?
- How do you understand the health of your operations?
- How do you manage workload and operations events?

Dedicate work cycles to making continuous incremental improvements
Perform post-incident analysis of all customer impacting events
Identify the contributing factors and preventative action to limit or prevent recurrence
Communicate contributing factors with affected communities as appropriate
Ask:
- How do you evolve operations?