Supercharge your innovation: Automate for operational excellence (SUP307)

Building a Cloud Automation Practice

Operational Excellence

  • Operational excellence is a continuous improvement of operations to ensure effectiveness and efficiency in delivering business outcomes.
  • To achieve operational excellence on AWS, the key is to follow AWS best practices:
    • Build resilient workloads and infrastructure
    • Identify and remediate risks
    • Prioritize security as job zero
    • Optimize resources and costs

Overcoming Operational Challenges

  1. Security Group Misconfigurations:

    • The traditional approach involves a manual process with long wait times.
    • The improved approach uses a configuration repository, event-driven automation, and standardized remediation to streamline the workflow and reduce risks.
  2. Unattached EBS Volumes:

    • The traditional approach involves a manual process with long wait times.
    • The improved approach uses a policy-based configuration repository, event-driven automation, and standardized remediation to streamline the workflow and reduce costs.
  3. RDS SSL/TLS Certificate Rotation:

    • The traditional approach involves a manual process with long wait times and potential outages.
    • The improved approach uses a Python script to automate the SSL/TLS certificate rotation, leveraging RDS instance metadata and tags to make informed decisions and schedule the changes.

Building a Cloud Automation Practice

  • Automation is only half the story; building a Cloud Automation Practice is crucial for achieving operational excellence at scale.
  • The key elements of a Cloud Automation Practice:
    • Flywheel Concept: Gain momentum through a cycle of automation, consistency, and operational efficiency.
    • Tenets: Guiding principles, such as automating repetitive tasks, focusing on ROI, and avoiding reinventing the wheel.
    • People, Process, and Technology:
      • People: Roles and responsibilities (users, governance team, developers, security)
      • Process: Prioritization metrics, automation development lifecycle
      • Technology: Examples of automating Identity and Access Management (IAM) and support case handling

Conclusion and Key Takeaways

  • Automation is essential, but building a Cloud Automation Practice is crucial for achieving operational excellence at scale.
  • Consider leveraging managed service providers to accelerate your Cloud Automation Practice journey.
  • Identify and automate one repetitive task as a starting point, measure the impact, and build a case for a Cloud Automation Practice in your organization.

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