Operational excellence pillar introduction
Introduction
HashiCorp Well-Architected Framework provides best-practice guidance for organizations. Specifically, it aims to help practitioners optimize their production HashiCorp deployments while meeting their organization's specific architectural needs. The well-architected framework starts at the cloud operating model, it sets the overarching goal of the framework, cloud migration enablement.
The operational excellence pillar recommends strategies to enable your organization to build products quickly and efficiently; including shipping changes, updates, and upgrades. These strategies will help teams in your organization to collaborate with each other without delays or friction, even in failure scenarios. They include recommendations for both team and infrastructure architecture.
Reproducible infrastructure and team enablement
Conway's law states that, "any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure." Misalignment or lack of communication between teams slows the production cycle and change management. Enabling teams to have clear communication will directly impact the success of your organization's products.
Terraform allows your teams to achieve shared services for infrastructure provisioning. IT teams should start by implementing reproducible infrastructure as code practices and then layering compliance and governance workflows to ensure appropriate controls. Once your team is competent with Terraform, it will also allow them to more easily adjust to demand that requires them to spin up thousands of servers or scale them down when not in use.
Best Practices
HashiCorp's operational excellence pillar provides best practices to,
- architect and automate infrastructure.
- enable teams.
Architect and automate infrastructure
Manual provisioning of infrastructure is risky, inefficient, and difficult to scale. Operator error is inevitable, and while you can create audit logs of user actions, it can be hard to diagnose failures. Furthermore, as your organization grows, there will be a higher volume of changes to monitor and deploy, and manual processes will slow your development velocity. By standardizing on best practices and automating repeated workflows, you can more safely and efficiently introduce changes to your infrastructure
When you establish operational excellence, you enable your team to focus on development by creating safe, consistent, and reliable workflows for deployment. Standardized processes allow teams to work efficiently and more easily adapt to changes in technology or business requirements.
Enable teams
A common cause of blockers within a team or organization is poor communication. Poor communication leads to misalignment of goals; which can delay deployments and projects if not addressed. Another blocker for teams is a lack of technical expertise or abilities. Which can also lead to delayed deployments, or worse, failed deployments that cause production outages.
Successful implementation of tools, workflows, process, applications, etc. requires collaboration and clear communication across teams and organizations. You can enable teams to operate the most efficiently with company-wide guiding principles, resources to develop specialized skill sets, and regular retrospectives.
Resources
Implement the operational excellence best practices at your organization with our step-by-step tutorials, reference documentation, and whitepapers.
Each best practice document provides HashiCorp recommendations and resources for implementation.
Finally, the list of resources for this pillar compiles all the related resources for quick reference.