Month: August 2021

Evolving Your Operations Through AWS

Use the AWS Well-Architected Framework to evolve your operations and ensure your company can take on new challenges.

Operational Excellence, the first pillar of the Well-Architected Framework, prioritises the ability to evolve your code and organisation so you can learn from failure.

Best Practice: Evolve
To evolve the effectiveness and efficiency of your business, the Well-Architected Framework suggests continually making small adjustments.

Instead of having a yearly review and making sweeping and possibly expensive changes, have a team who is constantly evaluating your workload, applications and organisation to ensure it’s operating at peak efficiency.

Continuous Improvement
Using post-incident analysis, determine what went wrong and outline steps to ensure the same mistakes don’t occur again. Make all teams aware of the problem, and search all areas of your organisation for similar problem areas.

Feedback loops can identify problem areas before they become incidents. Have your evaluation team monitor all feedback loops and alert relevant team leaders when the outcomes fall flat against the predicted baselines.

Knowledge Management
Create an information structure with current, updated information that all team members can access. Also, make it clear when the data needs to be updated or archived.

It’s vital that your organisation only uses current information. Outdated or inaccurate information can cause severe problems for your company and your customers.

Drivers for Improvement
What exactly do you want to improve, and is it possible? Before discussing desired improvements, confirm that your workload supports them.

There are three types of improvements: desired capabilities, unacceptable issues, and compliance requirements.

Desired capabilities can be anything you want to improve in your company. If they aren’t immediately possible, have your team slowly refine your operations and applications in the correct direction.

Address unacceptable issues as soon as possible. They can include security gaps and bugs that slow down your production.

Compliance requirements for AWS change occasionally. Work with a Well-Architected Framework Partner to check your operations are compliant and to identify any High-Risk Items.

Validate Insights and Share Information
Confirm your insights and decisions with outside experts. Fresh eyes can sometimes find problems your company missed.

Don’t forget to document and share all new information and insights with your whole company. Even if the information seems irrelevant to some teams, as your structure evolves, it may become relevant in the future.

Schedule an AWS Well-Architected Review
To evolve your operations through AWS, schedule a Well-Architected Review with WOLK. Keep your company up to date and successful by continuously improving and developing using the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Importance of Reliability For Cloud Services

For any business using cloud computing to operate, reliability is crucial. Malfunctioning or poorly built apps, programs, and other software can lead to a loss of productivity. This can have a knock-on effect, resulting in reduced profits and a diminished reputation among consumers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) uses a five-pillar Well-Architected framework to help businesses develop cloud-based workloads.

The Third Pillar: Reliability
The reliability pillar uses its five design principles to help businesses create workloads that can perform optimally and consistently throughout their entire lifecycle. These design principles lay the foundations for reliable cloud services.

Automatically Recover from Failure
Every company should set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor the effectiveness of each system. If kept in line with the goals of the business, KPIs can quickly determine if there is a problem with a particular workload.

You can put AWS systems in place to engage automatic recovery processes if failures occur. While the reliability of software is important, reliable recovery systems are vital.

Test Recovery Procedures
In many scenarios, businesses don’t use testing for recovery strategies. With AWS, you can test areas of failure within a workload before deciding on the best recovery procedures to adopt. By realising potential problems, you can test and resolve them before a genuine failure scenario happens.

Scale Horizontally to Increase Aggregate Workload Availability
Horizontal scaling involves replacing a large singular resource with several smaller ones. This makes individual workload failures less impactful. With no common point of failure, each system is more reliable.

Stop Guessing Capacity
Over demanding from workloads is a frequent cause of failure. Through AWS systems, businesses can closely monitor the correlation between workload demands and the optimal utilisation of resources. This limits over or under capacitation, resulting in more reliable workloads.

Manage Change in Automation
Automated processes can be tracked, monitored, and reviewed, increasing their reliability. Adjustments are quicker and easier to make than with manual-based systems.

Best Practice Areas for Reliability
In the AWS framework, there are four best practice areas for reliability. From establishing reliable foundations through installing adequate network bandwidth to implementing fast and effective failure management and recovery systems, best practices are essential for reliable cloud services.

The four best practice areas are:

● Foundations
● Workload Architecture
● Change Management
● Failure Management

Increase the Reliability of Your Cloud Services With AWS
At WOLK, we can help you engage with the AWS reliability pillar design principles and best practices to create reliable systems and workloads. Our expert team is a certified AWS Well-Architected Framework review provider so we can guide you through the process from start to finish.

Contact WOLK today to arrange a review.

AWS and Operational Excellence: Organisational Best Practices

The AWS Well-Architected Framework exists to help businesses make their applications and workloads as efficient and secure as possible. It consists of five pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimisation.

The First Pillar

Operational excellence is the first pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. In addition to making sure your workload and applications run smoothly, operational excellence also focuses on making small and reversible changes and dealing with failure.

Operational excellence includes four best practice areas, which are organisation, preparation, operation and evolution. Compliance within all these areas helps your company to succeed and grow.

Organisation

The best practise area of organisation deals with employee structure. It looks at the organisation of your teams and employees in terms of your workload and applications. It’s essential to have a clear structure with clearly defined employee responsibilities and priorities.

Each team should know their position in the company and be aware of how their actions affect other groups and vice versa. You should clearly define the hierarchy of each team to the whole company.

The structure of the workload also needs to be clearly defined. Assign an employee to every application, workload, platform and infrastructure component.

There are a few other steps to follow to help you achieve operational excellence.

1. Evaluate Needs

The first step in the Organisation Best Practice is to identify and evaluate needs, both internal and external. Once identified, you can determine what to prioritise.

External customer needs could involve your stakeholders, important customers or government regulations that impact your business.

Your business, development, or operational teams might have internal needs that could affect your customers.

2. Evaluate Threats

Threats to your business can be anything from other competitors to liability or security risks. Once you’ve found all the dangers, keep track of them in a risk registry. Periodically review the risk registry to determine if it’s possible to mitigate these risks or if they’ve grown in importance.

3. Encourage Experimentation

To encourage growth, build in time for your employees to learn about new techniques and advances in your field. Successful experimentation often results in more efficient practices.

Using the AWS Well-Architected Framework

The AWS Well-Architected Tool helps businesses to implement the Framework. There are also companies that can perform a Well-Architected Review to help you achieve full compliance.

WOLK is an experienced, long-term partner of the AWS Well-Architected Tool who can identify and remediate any high-risk items so you can follow the Organisational Best Practices.