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Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of the AWS Well-Architected Framework DevOps Guidance. The AWS DevOps Guidance introduces the AWS DevOps Sagas—a collection of modern capabilities that together form a comprehensive approach to designing, developing, securing, and efficiently operating software at cloud scale. Taking the learnings from Amazon’s own transformation journey and our experience managing global cloud services, the AWS DevOps Guidance was built to equip organizations of all sizes with best practice culture, processes, and technical capabilities that help to deliver business value and applications more securely and at a higher velocity. A Glimpse into Amazon’s DevOps Transformation In the early 2000s, Amazon went through its own DevOps transformation which led to an online bookstore forming the AWS cloud computing division. Today, AWS provides a wide range of products and services for global customers that are powered by that same innovative DevOps approach. Due to the positive effects of this transformation, AWS recognizes the significance of DevOps and has been at the forefront of its adoption and implementation. Amazon’s own journey, along with the collective experience gained from assisting customers as they modernize and migrate to the cloud, provided insight into the capabilities which we believe make DevOps adoption successful. With these learnings, we created the DevOps Sagas to help our customers sustainably adopt and practice DevOps through the implementation of an interconnected set of capabilities. Each DevOps Saga includes prescriptive guidance for capabilities that provide indicators of success, metrics to measure, and common anti-patterns to avoid. Introducing The DevOps Sagas The DevOps Sagas are core domains within the software delivery process that collectively form AWS DevOps best practices. Together, they encompass a collection of modern capabilities representing a comprehensive approach to designing, developing, securing, and efficiently operating software at cloud scale. You can use the DevOps Sagas as a common definition of what DevOps means to your organization by aligning on a shared understanding within your organization and to consistently measure DevOps adoption over time. The 5 DevOps Sagas are: Organizational Adoption Saga: Inspires the formation of a customer-centric, adaptive culture focused on optimizing people-driven processes, personal and professional development, and improving developer experience to set the foundation for successful DevOps adoption. Development Lifecycle Saga: Aims to enhance the organization’s capacity to develop, review, and deploy workloads swiftly and securely. It leverages feedback loops, consistent deployment methods, and an ‘everything-as-code’ approach to attain efficiency in deployment. Quality Assurance Saga: Advocates for a proactive, test-first methodology integrated into the development process to ensure that applications are well-architected by design, secure, cost-efficient, sustainable, and delivered with increased agility through automation. Automated Governance Saga: Facilitates directive, detective, preventive, and responsive measures at all stages of the development process. It emphasizes risk management, business process adherence, and application and infrastructure compliance at scale through automated processes, policies, and guardrails. Observability Saga: Presents an approach to incorporating observability within environment and workloads, allowing teams to detect and address issues, improve performance, reduce costs, and ensure alignment with business objectives and customer needs. Who should use the AWS DevOps Guidance? We recognize that every organization is unique and that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to practicing DevOps. The recommendations and examples provided can be tailored to suit your organization’s environment, quality, and security needs. The AWS DevOps Guidance is designed for a wide range of professionals and organizations, including startups exploring DevOps for the first time, established enterprises refining their processes, public sector companies, cloud-native businesses, and customers migrating to the AWS Cloud. Whether you are steering strategic direction as a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) or Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), a developer or architect actively engaged in designing and deploying workloads, or in a compliance role overseeing quality assurance, auditing, or governance, this guidance is tailored to help you. Next Steps With the release of the AWS DevOps Guidance, we encourage you, our customers, to download and read the document, as well as implement and test your workloads in accordance with the recommendations within. Use the AWS DevOps Guidance in tandem with the AWS Well-Architected Framework to conduct an assessment of your organization and individual workload’s adherence to DevOps best practices to pinpoint areas of strength and opportunities for improvement. Collaborate with your teams – from developers to operations and decision-makers – to share insights from your assessment. Use the insights gained from the AWS DevOps Guidance to prioritize areas of improvement and iteratively improve your DevOps capabilities. Find the AWS DevOps Guidance on the AWS Well-Architected website or contact your AWS account team for more information. As with the AWS Well-Architected Framework and other industry and technology guidance, we recommend leveraging the AWS DevOps Guidance early and often – as you approach architectural and service design decisions, and whenever you carry out Well-Architected reviews. As you use the AWS DevOps Guidance, we would appreciate your comments and feedback to help us improve as best practices and technology evolve. We will continually refresh the content as we identify new best practices, metrics, and common scenarios. View the full article

When the margin for error is razor thin, it is best to assume that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. AWS customers are increasingly building resilient workloads that continue to operate while tolerating faults in systems. When customers build mission-critical applications on AWS, they have to make sure that every piece in their system is designed in such a way that the system continues to work while things go wrong. AWS customers have applied the principle of design for failure to build scalable mission-critical systems that meet the highest standards of reliability. The best practices established in the AWS Well Architected framework have allowed teams to improve systems continuously while minimizing business disruptions. Let’s look at a few key design principles we have seen customers use to operate workloads that cannot afford downtime... View the full article

We are excited to announce the availability of improved AWS Well-Architected Framework guidance. In this update, we have made changes across all six pillars of the framework: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. In this release, we have made the implementation guidance for the new and updated best practices more prescriptive, including enhanced recommendations and steps on reusable architecture patterns targeting specific business outcomes in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud... View the full article

AWS is pleased to announce an update to the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which will provide customers and partners with more prescriptive guidance on building and operating in the cloud, and enable them to stay up-to-date on the latest architectural best practices in a constantly evolving technological landscape. View the full article

Introducing AWS Well-Architected Review Templates, designed to eliminate duplication and foster consistency across your workloads. With the Well-Architected Tool's latest feature, you can effortlessly craft review templates to answer questions, update notes, and even incorporate Custom Lenses across your workloads. View the full article

AWS Well-Architected Tool now integrates with AWS Organizations enabling cloud architects to share their workloads and custom lenses more broadly across their organization. AWS Organizations is an account management service that allows customers to consolidate multiple AWS accounts into a single, centrally managed organization. This update will increase efficiency and make it easier to share lenses and workloads with multiple accounts. View the full article

AWS Well-Architected Tool now allows customers to preview custom lens content before publishing, add additional URLs to helpful resources and improvement plans, and use tags to assign metadata to their custom lenses. View the full article

AWS Well-Architected Tool now features direct access to AWS re:Post, a community-driven, questions-and-answers service designed to help AWS customers remove technical roadblocks, accelerate innovation, and enhance operation. AWS re:Post has 40+ topics including a community specific to AWS Well-Architected. View the full article

AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners are now able to prepare for the APN Foundational Technical Review (FTR) by applying the new AWS Well-Architected Tool FTR Lens to workloads when you conduct a Well-Architected Framework Review in the AWS Well-Architected Tool. View the full article

The AWS SaaS Factory Program and AWS Well-Architected teams have combined their expertise in architectural best practices and knowledge of SaaS solutions to launch the new AWS Well-Architected SaaS Lens. View the full article