The Well-Architected Framework has five main pillars. The first pillar is Operational Excellence. By implementing the recommended design best practices of this pillar, you can increase the output of cloud applications.

Initially, cloud users encountered recurring problems. With little advancements, it was difficult to understand the root cause of problems. For example:

  • Crashing applications
  • Reversing wrong lines of code
  • It was difficult examining why apps fail.
  • It was difficult to offer recommendations for improvement from failed processes.

The Operational Excellence Framework helps mitigate all operational issues. 

What is Operational Excellence? 

Operational excellence involves making small improvements to cloud applications until you achieve a sustainable infrastructure. Users have to note insights and implement best practices from the design to deployment phase for every operation. 

To increase operational efficiency, you can implement the following design principles:

  • Make everything “As a Code”: Whether you’re dealing with infrastructure or operations, it helps to have a uniform cloud environment. AWS helps cloud users to implement operations as a code, infrastructure as a code, and make their applications as a code. The code approach makes it easy to automate tasks. More automation reduces human error, hence increasing efficiency.
  • Work in Small Milestones: Instead of putting thousands of lines of code in one script, split large workloads into smaller ones. If there’s an interruption, it’s easy to mitigate losses. In addition, you can encrypt and secure each segment, a process known as micro-segmentation. This design principle ensures other parts of the application continue working even if one segment fails.
  • Do Frequent Pen-Testing: The Operation Excellence pillar teaches that you can’t be confident about your application without testing. While testing for effectiveness is important, operational excellence requires you to test security as well. Developers have to assume that no application is perfect. For this reason, developers have to fix the root causes of failure through frequent testing.
  • Update Your Applications Regularly: Update all user-friendly applications frequently. You can update the user interface and let users vote for the best one. An operationally effective application will incorporate its users’ needs in its design.

How to Increase Operational Efficiency

Here are three steps to increasing AWS Operational Efficiency:

1. Prepare Your Environment

Familiarize your team members with the cloud environment. Train them on the five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Train your management, finance, and IT business units as well. You can also assess the health status of your cloud environment. A health report reveals both high- and low-scoring areas. In addition, a detailed health report can highlight areas of improvement.

2. Organize Your Team

Use a simple workload organization strategy. Create workstreams for each section of the cloud. Each workstream will have a leader who conducts meetings to discuss how he or she will meet the objectives. Also, link each objective to a cloud metric to help measure performance. Have a leader for each infrastructure, each account, and each application. An internal communications guy can also help sync communications within business units.

3. Use Cloud Tools

There are many tools to simplify your operational efficiency process. For example, Amazon CloudWatch has a dashboard where you can gain visibility into development processes and workloads. Users can set up trigger alarms to help respond to failed operations faster. In addition, AWS users can schedule events, set up custom logins, and manage advanced workloads with the tool.

You can leverage the Systems Manager tool to automate commands. Instead of doing operations manually, the AWS Systems Manager helps remove human error in cloud operations, making them more efficient. In addition, AWS helps you automate repeatable deployments. You can also copy repeated rules across hybrid environments. 

Optimize AWS with nOps

If you’re looking to optimize your efficiency on AWS, the nOps all-in-one cloud platform features include:

  • Cloud Visibility: Reports, dashboards, cost allocation, forecasting, budgets, alerts & more with one-click integrations for AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, GenAI and SaaS
  • Compute Optimization: Optimize every level of your compute, from the container level all the way to pricing
  • Commitment management: Use 100% of your commitments with a risk-free guarantee
  • Resource cleanup: One-click rightsizing, storage optimization, scheduling & more

nOps was recently ranked #1 with five stars in G2’s cloud cost management category, and we optimize $2+ billion in cloud spend for our customers.

Join our customers using nOps to understand your cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo today!