Operational Excellence

This focuses on running and monitoring your deployment and continually evaluating the systems for improvement. It covers a great deal of how you set things up and should cover Infrastructure as code (IaC) as a core practice, as well as how you respond to requests and incidents.

From a business point of view a good solutions architect should be looking at how you fold back the learnings into processes, ensuring leasons are learn when there are operational issues and helping the business either avoid or recover more quickly. You should also be looking at the new feature’s be released and deciding if this will help you remove operational overhead. A great example of this is when intelligent tiering was released. Intelligent tiering in a nut shell helps you manage you data in S3 storage classes and moves the least active objects to cheaper tiers of storage. Before intelligent tiering, devops team would have to monitor this and make decisions on the creation of lifecycle policies, now intelligent tiering is here this free’s up time for the devops team and removes the human error factor also.