Operational Excellence Considerations

Application maintainability is one of the main aspects that a solutions architect should consider during architectural design. Every new project starts with lots of planning and resources at the beginning and teams spend the initial months creating and launching your application. After the production launch, the application needs several things to be taken care of to keep operating. You need to continually monitor your application to find and resolve any issues on a day-to-day basis.

The operations team needs to handle application infrastructure, security, and any software issues to make sure your application is running reliably without any problems or issues. Often, enterprise applications are complex, with defined Service-Level Agreements (SLA) regarding application availability. Your operations team needs to understand business requirements and prepare themselves accordingly to respond to any event.

Operational excellence is all about...

Design principles for operational excellence

Operational excellence is about running your application with minimal possible interruption to gain maximum business value. It is about applying continuous improvements to make the system efficient.

The following sections talk about the standard design principles that can help you strengthen your system’s maintainability. You will find that all operational excellence design principles are closely related to and complement each other.

Automating manual tasks

Technology moves fast, and IT operations need to keep up with that, particularly where hardware and software inventories are procured from multiple vendors. Enterprises are building hybrid cloud and multi-cloud systems, so you must learn how to handle both on-premises and cloud operations. Modern systems have extensive user bases, with various microservices working together and millions of devices connected in a network. There are many moving parts in an IT operation...

Selecting technologies for operational excellence

The operations team needs to create procedures and steps to handle any operational incidents and validate the effectiveness of their actions. They need to understand the business need to provide efficient support and collect systems and business metrics to measure the achievement of business outcomes.

The operational procedure can be categorized into three phases—planning, functioning, and improving. Let’s explore technologies that can help in each phase.

Planning for operational excellence

The first step in the operational excellence process is to define operational priorities to focus on the high business impact areas. Those areas could be, for example, applying automation, streamlining monitoring, developing team skills as the workload evolves, and focusing on improving overall workload performance.

There are tools and services available that crawl through your system by scanning logs and system activity...

Achieving operational excellence in the public cloud

A public cloud provider such as AWS, GCP, or Azure provides many inbuilt capabilities and guidance to achieve operational excellence in the cloud, for example, cloud providers advocate automation, one of the most essential factors for operational excellence.

Taking the example of the AWS cloud, the following services can help to achieve operational excellence:

• The following AWS services help you in the planning phase:
  • AWS Trusted Advisor: AWS Trusted Advisor checks your workload based on prebuilt best practices and provides recommendations to implement them.
  • AWS CloudFormation: With AWS CloudFormation, the entire workload can be viewed as code, including applications, infrastructure, policy, governance, and operations.
  • AWS Systems Manager: AWS Systems Manager provides the ability to manage cloud servers in bulk for patching, updates, and overall maintenance.
• The...

Driving efficiency with CloudOps

CloudOps refers to processes, tools, and best practices for efficiently operating and managing cloud environments. Benefits of CloudOps include improved efficiency, reduced costs, better security and compliance, faster recovery from failures, and the ability to scale rapidly.

The key pillars of CloudOps, applicable across cloud providers, are:

• Set up governance: Implement a secure, well-architected environment. Utilize tools like AWS Organizations, Azure Management Groups, or Google Cloud Resource Manager for account organization and governance. Enforce policies with tools such as AWS Control Tower, Azure Blueprints, or Google Cloud’s Policy Intelligence.
• Enable compliance: Continuously monitor configurations with tools like AWS Config, Azure Policy, or Google Cloud Security Command Center. Automate compliance checks and remediation to align with industry standards.
• Provision and orchestrate: Accelerate environment...

Summary

Operational excellence can be achieved by continuously improving according to operational needs and lessons learned from past events. You can achieve business success by increasing the excellence of your operations. Focus on developing and managing applications in a way that boosts efficiency and ensures highly responsive deployments. Implementing best practices in your workloads is key to achieving operational excellence.

In this chapter, you learned about the design principles to achieve operational excellence. These principles advocate operation automation, continuous improvement, incremental approaches, predicting failure, and being ready to respond.

You learned about various phases of operational excellence and corresponding technology choices. In the planning phase, you learned about ITAM to track the inventory of IT resources and identify dependencies between them using configuration management.

You learned about alerts and monitoring in the functioning...