Well-Architected Framework: Operational excellence pillar

Last reviewed 2024-10-31 UTC

The operational excellence pillar in the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework provides recommendations to operate workloads efficiently on Google Cloud. Operational excellence in the cloud involves designing, implementing, and managing cloud solutions that provide value, performance, security, and reliability. The recommendations in this pillar help you to continuously improve and adapt workloads to meet the dynamic and ever-evolving needs in the cloud.

The operational excellence pillar is relevant to the following audiences:

  • Managers and leaders: A framework to establish and maintain operational excellence in the cloud and to ensure that cloud investments deliver value and support business objectives.
  • Cloud operations teams: Guidance to manage incidents and problems, plan capacity, optimize performance, and manage change.
  • Site reliability engineers (SREs): Best practices that help you to achieve high levels of service reliability, including monitoring, incident response, and automation.
  • Cloud architects and engineers: Operational requirements and best practices for the design and implementation phases, to help ensure that solutions are designed for operational efficiency and scalability.
  • DevOps teams: Guidance about automation, CI/CD pipelines, and change management, to help enable faster and more reliable software delivery.

To achieve operational excellence, you should embrace automation, orchestration, and data-driven insights. Automation helps to eliminate toil. It also streamlines and builds guardrails around repetitive tasks. Orchestration helps to coordinate complex processes. Data-driven insights enable evidence-based decision-making. By using these practices, you can optimize cloud operations, reduce costs, improve service availability, and enhance security.

Operational excellence in the cloud goes beyond technical proficiency in cloud operations. It includes a cultural shift that encourages continuous learning and experimentation. Teams must be empowered to innovate, iterate, and adopt a growth mindset. A culture of operational excellence fosters a collaborative environment where individuals are encouraged to share ideas, challenge assumptions, and drive improvement.

For operational excellence principles and recommendations that are specific to AI and ML workloads, see AI and ML perspective: Operational excellence in the Well-Architected Framework.

Core principles

The recommendations in the operational excellence pillar of the Well-Architected Framework are mapped to the following core principles:

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