Operational Excellence Checklist
This checklist presents a set of recommendations to help you build a culture of operational
excellence. Start with a DevOps approach to integrate specializations from multiple disciplines.
This approach creates a rigorous design and development practice. This approach leads to
repeatable, reliable, and safe deployments of infrastructure and code.
Determine workload team members' specializations and integrate them into a robust set of practices
to design, develop, deploy, and operate your workload to specification. Team members must have clarity in
decision-making and responsibilities, value continuous improvement and optimization, and adopt a
blameless culture that incorporates continuous learning.
Formalize the way you run routine, as needed, and emergency operational tasks by using
documentation, checklists, or automation. Strive for consistency and predictability for team processes and
deliverables by adopting industry-leading practices and approaches, such as a shift left approach.
Formalize software ideation and planning processes. Draw from established industry and organizational
standards. Use a common, prioritized backlog and sufficiently detailed specifications. Based on outcomes,
drive continuous improvements in your planning process.
Optimize software development and quality assurance processes by following industry-proven
practices for development and testing. For unambiguous role designation, standardize practices across
components such as tooling, source control, application design patterns, documentation, and style guides.
Prepare resources and their configurations by using a standardized infrastructure as code (IaC)
approach. Like other code, design IaC with consistent styles, appropriate modularization, and quality
assurance. Prefer a declarative approach when possible.
Build a workload supply chain that drives proposed changes through predictable, automated pipelines.
The pipelines test and promote those changes across environments. Optimize a supply chain to make your
workload reliable, secure, cost effective, and performant.
Design and implement a monitoring system to validate design choices and inform future design and
business decisions. This system captures and exposes operational telemetry, metrics, and logs that emit
from the workload's infrastructure and code.
Develop an effective emergency operations practice. Ensure that your workload emits meaningful health
signals across infrastructure and code. Collect the resulting data and use it to generate actionable alerts
that enact emergency responses via dashboards and queries. Clearly define human responsibilities, such as
on-call rotations, incident management, emergency resource access, and running postmortems.
Automate all tasks that don't benefit from the insight and adaptability of human intervention, are
highly procedural, and have a shelf-life that yields a return on automation investment. When
possible, choose off-the-shelf software for automation versus custom implementations. Treat all
automation the same as workload components and apply the Well-Architected Framework pillars to its
design and implementation.
Design and implement automation upfront for operations such as life cycle concerns, bootstrapping,
and applying governance and compliance guardrails. Don't try to retrofit automation later. Choose
automation features that your platform provides.
Clearly define your workload's safe deployment practices. Emphasize the ideals of small, incremental,
quality-gated release methods. Use modern deployment patterns and progressive exposure techniques to
control risk. Account for routine deployments and emergency, or hotfix, deployments.
Implement a deployment failure mitigation strategy that addresses unexpected mid-rollout issues with
rapid recovery. Combine multiple approaches, such as rollback, feature disablement, or using your
deployment pattern's native capabilities.
