Overview of the operational excellence pillar

The operational excellence pillar covers the operations processes that keep an application running in production. Deployments must be reliable and predictable. Automated deployments reduce the chance of human error. Fast and routine deployment processes won't slow down the release of new features or bug fixes. Equally important, you must be able to quickly roll back or roll forward if an update has problems.

To assess your workload using the tenets found in the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework, reference the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Review.

We recommend the following video to help you achieve operational excellence with the Azure Well-Architected Framework:

Topics

The Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework includes the following topics in the operational excellence pillar:

Operational excellence topics	Description
Application design	Provides guidance on how to design, build, and orchestrate workloads with DevOps principles in mind.
Monitoring	Monitoring and diagnostics are essential to any workload. Specifically for cloud applications that run in a remote datacenter often this discipline becomes even more crucial.
Application performance management	The monitoring and management of performance, and availability of software applications through DevOps.
Code deployment	How you deploy your application code is one of the key factors that determines your application stability.
Infrastructure provisioning	Frequently known as Deployment Automation or Infrastructure as code, this discipline refers to best practices for deploying the platform where your application will run.
Testing	Testing is fundamental to prepare for the unexpected and to catch mistakes before they impact users.

Enforcing resource-level rules through Azure Policy helps ensure adoption of operational excellence best practices for all the assets, which support your workload. For example, Azure Policy can help ensure all the VMs supporting your workload adhere to a pre-approved list of VM SKUs.

Azure Advisor provides a set of Azure Policy recommendations to help you quickly identify opportunities to implement Azure Policy best practices for your workload.

Use the DevOps checklist to review your design from a management and DevOps standpoint.

Next steps

Reference the operational excellence principles to guide you in your overall strategy.

Principles