Operational excellence pillar introduction
Introduction
The HashiCorp Well-Architected Framework helps you migrate workloads to a multi-cloud architecture that is secure, reliable, high-performing, and resilient. The operational excellence pillar recommends strategies to enable your organization to build products efficiently; including shipping changes, updates, and upgrades. These strategies help teams in your organization collaborate with each other without delays or friction, even in failure scenarios.
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 affect 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 comfortable with Terraform, they can adjust to demand that requires them to spin up thousands of servers and scale them down when not in use.
Best practices
HashiCorp's operational excellence pillar provides best practices to,
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
Infrastructure as code (IaC) lets you build your infrastructure in an automated, repeatable way. You can codify your infrastructure with Terraform to standardize your deployment across your organization using a single configuration language, tool, and implementation pattern.
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, processes, applications, etc. requires collaboration and clear communication across teams and organizations. You can create high performing teams to operate the most efficiently with company-wide guiding principles, resources to develop specialized skill sets, and regular retrospectives.
Implement iteratively
It's unrealistic to implement every recommendation from day one. Instead, we recommend that you evolve your manual deployments over time. The strategies you use to automate and deploy your infrastructure should be constantly evolving to meet the needs of your organization. A good way to approach this is to identify best practices to automate infrastructure early and see which best practices your organization may already be following.