AWS WAF pillar one: Operational excellence tools and best practices
Harnessing the full power of the AWS® cloud involves far more than building a solid technical infrastructure. Amazon developed the Well-Architected Framework (WAF) to enable companies to build the most operationally excellent, secure, reliable, efficiently high-performing, and cost-optimized infrastructure possible for their businesses. This post addresses the first pillar, operational excellence.
Business operations play an increasing role in how companies can truly transform business through cloud computing. Operational excellence is one of the five pillars, or areas of focus in the AWS WAF. The AWS WAF operational excellence pillar covers best practices around developing robust, repeatable processes for all aspects of managing your cloud infrastructure.
Operational Excellence in the AWS cloud starts with preparation
Like a pilot runs through a pre-flight checklist before takeoff, AWS recommends you use operational checklists to ensure that your workloads are ready for production operation and prevent migrating untested workloads to production.
Operational excellence checklists
Create and use these checklists for operational excellence in AWS:
- Operational checklist: Create an operational checklist that you use to evaluate if you are ready to operate the workload.
- Planning checklist: This may seem redundant, but it is important to have a plan that syncs with company events, milestones, and roadmaps to stay in front of events that might cause sudden increases in traffic and requests for specific resources, where network performance could impact a company’s revenue or reputation.
- Security checklist: Security is among the most misunderstood features of the cloud. You should develop and use a detailed security checklist to ensure that you are ready to securely operate the workload and respond to any security event or attack.
AWS configuration management best practices
You should document how you monitor, measure, and manage your architecture, environments, and the configuration parameters for resources within them to easily identify components for tracking and troubleshooting.
Changes to configurations should also be trackable and automated. Within a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), you should record a detailed resource tracking program by using tags and metadata and thorough, accessible documentation of your entire architecture and infrastructure configuration.
Automate cloud deployment for operational excellence
Automation can take human error out of the operational excellence equation. You should include regular quality assurance testing and defined mechanisms that can continually track, audit, rollback, and review changes as warranted.
Best practices for AWS deployment automation include:
- Develop a deployment pipeline (such as a source code repository, build systems, deployment, and testing automation) with standard automated procedures for continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD).
- Have an automated release management process.
- Design a process to revert changes if they produce operational issues.
- Create risk management strategies ( such as blue/green, canary, A/B testing) to assess risks continually.
- Use system monitoring with CloudWatch® to monitor system performance.
- Set alarms and notifications based on key performance thresholds that indicate problems or opportunities for improvement.
- Automate actions based on performance, such as using Auto Scaling to add capacity based on current conditions automatically.
- Track and save logs, including application logs, AWS service-specific logs, and VPC flow logs by using CloudTrail® to troubleshoot and review performance.
Respond efficiently in AWS
Responding to network problems is as important as preventing them in the first place. You should be prepared to automate responses as much as possible, including alerts and notifications as well as actions and recovery. It is also important to have escalation procedures in place to get the right issue to the right resources as quickly as possible.
Best practices for responding to unplanned events include:
- Create an event response playbook that everyone follows. The playbook defines escalation guidelines and procedures and identifies the circumstances for when you should activate it.
- Automate responses as much as possible, such as using Auto Scaling to instantly add capacity when the system passes critical load thresholds.
- Develop a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to ensure that you can resolve, document, and fix issues so that they do not happen in the future. Make sure you’re not just fixing symptoms of a deeper problem.
- Develop an escalation process that puts the necessary stakeholders and systems in place for receiving alerts when escalations occur.
- Automate escalation as much as possible based on demand or time thresholds, sending the issue to the right resources.
- Create an automated escalation queue between appropriate functional teams based on priority, impact, and intake mechanisms.
- Use a demand- or time-based approach to escalate higher in the organization as impact, scale, or time to resolution and recovery of an incident increases.
- Define when external escalation to AWS or an AWS partner would be engaged.
Conclusion
The AWS Operational Excellence pillar focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business value and continually improving processes and procedures. It helps organizations spread the benefits of cloud adoption beyond the IT department. It also ensures that the cloud infrastructure can efficiently manage changes, respond to events, and automate standards-based tasks and processes to successfully manage daily operations.
Learn more about the other Well-Architected Framework pillars in this series:
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