Introduction
The Azure Well-Architected Framework is a design framework that can improve the quality of a workload by helping it to:
- Be resilient, available, and recoverable.
- Be as secure as you need it to be.
- Deliver a sufficient return on investment.
- Support responsible development and operations.
- Accomplish its purpose within acceptable timeframes.
At the core of the Operational Excellence pillar are DevOps practices that ensure workload quality through standardized workflows and team cohesion. This pillar defines operating procedures for development practices, observability, and release management. The goal is to minimize process variance, chances of human error, and disruption to customers. To assess your operational health, start with these questions:
Do you execute operations with discipline? Are customers using the workload with maximum predictability? How do you learn from experience and collected data to drive continuous improvement? Workload operations can devolve into chaotic practices when there's no clear ownership or leadership. In this type of environment, teams often resort to methods that are executed with high effort and produce low outcomes, which leads to poor user experience. These approaches meet only short-term goals. Long-term benefits are realized through continuous evaluation and strategic investments.
The concepts described in this module are not all-inclusive of operational excellence in a workload, but they represent the core principles and some of their key approaches when you're designing a workload. For a complete perspective, across all of the Well-Architected Framework pillars, visit the Azure Well-Architected Framework as you start planning and designing your architecture.
Each unit in this module focuses on one design principle and three approaches associated with that principle. The approaches in each unit are supported through the use of examples to help demonstrate how they can be applied to real-world scenarios. The examples are all based on a fictional company.
Learning objectives
By the end of this module, you'll understand the five principles of the Operational Excellence pillar and learn three approaches for each of the following:
- Adopt DevOps practices to optimize your team culture, embracing collaboration along with individual accountability and ownership.
- Gain efficiencies in development through standardization. Use standard processes and tools to improve your team's velocity.
- Build a robust observability platform to improve your operations practices.
- Build a secure, reliable and performative workload supply chain to enhance the confidence in your deployments.
- Embrace automation to relieve operational burden and improve security, reliability and performance.
- Establish standards for safely deploying changes to your workload and embrace a cultural mindset of treating all deployments with the same rigor.
Prerequisites
- Experience building or operating solutions by using core infrastructure technology such as data storage, compute, and networking
- Experience building or operating technology systems to solve business problems