Operational excellence can be achieved by working on continuous improvement as per operational needs, and lessons learned from past events using RCA. You can achieve business success by increasing the excellence of your operations. Build and operate applications that increase efficiency while building highly responsive deployments. Use best practices to make your workloads operationally excellent.

In this chapter, you learned about the design principles to achieve operational excellence. These principles advocate operation automation, continuous improvement, taking an incremental approach, predicting failure, and being ready to respond. You learned about various phases of operational excellence and corresponding to technology choices. In the planning phase, you learned about IT asset management to track the inventory of IT resources and identify dependencies between them using configuration management.

You learned about alerts and monitoring in the functioning phase of operational excellence. You got an idea about various kinds of monitoring, with examples such as infrastructure, application, log, security, and platform monitoring. You learned about the importance of alerts, and how to define alert severity and respond to it.

During the improvement phase of operational excellence, you learned about analytics in IT operations by building a big data pipeline, methods to perform RCA using the five whys, and the importance of auditing to save the system from any malicious behaviors and unnoticed threats. You learned about operational excellence in the cloud and different inbuilt tools that can be utilized for operational excellence in the AWS cloud.

As of now, you have learned best practices in the areas of performance, security, reliability, and operational excellence. In the next chapter, you will learn about best practices for cost optimization. You will also learn about various tools and techniques to optimize overall system costs and how to leverage multiple tools in the cloud to manage IT expenditure.