Achieving Operational Excellence in AWS: Measuring Impact

AWS Well-architected framework Operational Excellence pillar

3 min readFeb 14, 2024

Welcome to Day 5 of our deep dive into the Operational Excellence pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Today’s focus is on measuring the impact of our architectural decisions, a crucial step in ensuring that our AWS environment is not just well-architected but also aligned with our business objectives. We’ll define key metrics and KPIs, introduce AWS tools for measurement, and discuss the significance of quantifying architectural impact.

Defining Key Metrics and KPIs

Operational Excellence is about maintaining system health, improving efficiency, and driving business value through operations. To measure success in this domain, consider the following metrics and KPIs:

Automation Coverage: The percentage of operational processes automated.
Deployment Frequency: How often deployments occur without disrupting operations.
Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR): The average time to recover from a failure.
Change Failure Rate: The percentage of changes that lead to failure.

AWS Tools for Measuring Business Value

AWS provides several tools to help quantify the impact of your architecture on cost, performance, and reliability. Two standout tools are:

AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer enables you to visualize and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. Here’s a simple code sample to get started with Cost Explorer using Boto3, the AWS SDK for Python:

import boto3

# Initialize the Cost Explorer client
ce_client = boto3.client('ce')

# Get the last 6 months of EC2 cost and usage data
response = ce_client.get_cost_and_usage(
    TimePeriod={'Start': '2023-01-01', 'End': '2023-06-30'},
    Granularity='MONTHLY',
    Metrics=['UnblendedCost'],
    GroupBy=[{'Type': 'DIMENSION', 'Key': 'SERVICE'}],
    Filter={'Dimensions': {'Key': 'SERVICE', 'Values': ['Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - Compute']}}
)

print(response)

AWS Trusted Advisor

AWS Trusted Advisor inspects your AWS environment and provides real-time recommendations in five categories: cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service limits. To interact with Trusted Advisor programmatically, you can use the AWS SDK:

import boto3

# Initialize the Trusted Advisor client
ta_client = boto3.client('support')

# Get the list of all checks
checks = ta_client.describe_trusted_advisor_checks(language='en')

# Print check details
for check in checks['checks']:
    print(f"Check ID: {check['id']} - Name: {check['name']}")

The Importance of Quantifying Impact

Quantifying the impact of architectural decisions is fundamental to achieving operational excellence. It allows you to:

Make Informed Decisions: Data-driven insights lead to better decision-making regarding resource allocation, cost management, and operational improvements.
Demonstrate Business Value: By measuring and reporting on key metrics, you can directly correlate IT performance with business outcomes.
Drive Continuous Improvement: Regularly measuring performance against KPIs encourages a culture of continuous improvement, ensuring that operations remain aligned with business goals.

Conclusion

Measuring the impact of your AWS architectural decisions is a critical component of the Operational Excellence pillar. By defining appropriate metrics and KPIs and leveraging tools like AWS Cost Explorer and Trusted Advisor, you can ensure that your cloud infrastructure is cost-effective, performs well, and is reliable. This approach not only supports operational health but also aligns IT operations with broader business objectives, driving continuous improvement and innovation.