Understanding The 6 Pillars of AWS

AWS’s well-architected framework teaches you how to build, run, monitor, and secure large scale or small scale systems. By using the well-architected framework, you have access to learn the best practices to design a reliable, efficient, secure, and cost-effective system in the cloud. The AWS well-architected framework stands  upon six pillars:

What is Operational Excellence?

Operational excellence is about how your organisation supports business objectives, your ability to run workloads, gain insights into their operations, and continuously improve supporting processes and procedures to deliver business value.

It helps you ask the right questions so, you can build the right solutions. Operational excellence uses certain design principles, like using automation wherever possible in order to limit human error. For example: if you’re using infrastructure as code, you can add a review code that will look over the deployment process saving time and energy on the developer’s side.

There are four design principles to guide the key areas of operational excellence:

Operational Excellence

Organisation

To define priorities for business success, your teams must comprehend your total workload, their role in it, and your shared business goals. The organisation must work in harmony combining all teams’ efforts in pursuit of a singular set of goals. In the pursuit of operational excellence, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions.

Everyone in your organization must be working toward the same goal. Ensure that everyone knows how their actions affect the success of the company as a whole, by giving your team members the tools they need to help you achieve your business goals.

Your architecture’s operational events and failures should be viewed as opportunities for improvement. For example, The traditional organization framework divides teams into silos, a company who ditches these seperations and allows free and integrated communication among operations, production and security teams perform much better!

pillars of aws

Prepare

Your operations will be better prepared and able to respond more effectively to problems if you understand the demands of your workloads.

Planning makes a huge difference in mitigating issues that come up while deployment, using prior planning can provide necessary resources to deal with unexpected errors. For example, You can use AWS cloud formation to use operations as code in cloud, it would enable you to have consistent text and production environments with increasing levels of operations control.

aws operations

Operate

It is possible to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your activities by focusing on small improvements based on changing priorities and the lessons learned from event response and retrospective analysis.

AWS aims to help you develop and run architectures that maximise efficiency while allowing you to build highly responsive and adaptable deployments.. Following their best practices will help you do so. For example, you can use dashboards on AWS to communicate the status of your workloads to your Target audience, like developers, customers, business, operations etc. This will help in managing expectations and their actions.

cloud operations

Evolve

There are no shortcuts when it comes to maintaining operational excellence. Focus your time and energy on making small, incremental improvements. Perform a post-incident investigation of all incidents that affected customers. Preventive measures should be taken to restrict or prevent a recurrence.

You can provide relevant information to those who are affected by the issue as needed. It is important to regularly analyse and prioritise chances for improvement (such as new features or bug fixes, or compliance needs), encompassing both the workload and operational processes. For example, you can share lessons across teams and compare practices that work best!

All these guidelines might seem like a lot, but they are the map that guides us in the labyrinth of problem-solving and creating efficient and quality cloud frameworks.

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