Announcing the AWS Well-Architected Operational Readiness Review lens

In his “10 Lessons from 10 Years of Amazon Web Services,” Amazon chief technology officer (CTO) Werner Vogels acknowledged that “Failures are a given and everything will eventually fail over time.” With that in mind, at Amazon Web Services (AWS), we strive to build and operate resilient services—in part, by learning from failures.

To do this, we use a closed-loop mechanism called the Correction of Errors (COE) process. The COE is designed to prevent the event that occurred in a given workload from occurring in that workload again. However, we also apply learnings from failure events across workloads by using a program called the Operational Readiness Review (ORR) program. The ORR distills the learnings from AWS operational incidents into curated questions with best practices guidance. This enables builders to create highly available, resilient systems without sacrificing agility and speed. The ORR provides questions designed to uncover risks and guide service teams on the implementation of best practices. The ORR is essentially a checklist that our teams use to self-assess operational risks in their workloads, in order to achieve operational excellence. Checklists are common in many industries; a well-known example is in aviation, where pilots have a preflight checklist that they use before every flight. AWS has used the ORR to support major worldwide public sector customer launches.

Today, AWS announced the release of the ORR as a custom lens for the AWS Well-Architected Tool, which is designed to help you review the state of your applications and workloads against architectural best practices, identify opportunities for improvement, and track progress over time. Creating a custom lens for the Well-Architected Tool with the ORR program can help supplement Well-Architected reviews by including lessons learned that are specific to your business, culture, tools, and governance rules.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps customers understand the pros and cons of decisions made while building systems on AWS. By using the Framework, you can learn architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud. It provides a way for you to consistently measure architectures against best practices and identify areas for improvement. We believe that having well-architected systems greatly increases the likelihood of mission success.

How to install the Operational Readiness Review (ORR) custom lens

Once you install the ORR custom lens, it can be applied to workloads in your account. You can also share a custom lens with other AWS accounts and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users. Follow along to learn how to install it.

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the AWS Well-Architected Tool console.

2. Download the ORR custom lens JSON file from GitHub. The ORR custom lens JSON file is named orr-{version}-PUBLISHED.json. Download the file with the highest {version} number.

3. From the Well-Architected Tool, select Custom lenses on the left navigation menu.

Figure 1. Select Custom lenses in the Well-Architected Tool dashboard.

4. Select the Create custom lens button.

Figure 2. The Create custom lens window.

5. Under Custom lens file, select Choose file and upload the JSON file downloaded in Step 2. Select Submit.

Figure 3. The Custom lenses owned by me window.

6. On the Well-Architected Tool Custom lenses page, select the new custom lens you generated.

Figure 4. The AWS Internal Operational Readiness Review field within Custom lenses setup.

7. Choose to preview the experience, or you can publish the lens to use it with your existing and future workloads, or to share the lens with other AWS accounts and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users.

8. From the Custom lenses list, check the desired custom lens. Then, select Actions and choose Publish lens.

Figure 5. Publish lens.

9. In the Version name field, enter a unique identifier for the version change. This value can be up to 32 characters and must only contain alphanumeric characters and periods (“.”).

Figure 6. Publish: Select version name.

10. Select Publish to launch your custom lens.

After a custom lens has been published, it’s in PUBLISHED status and can be shared across accounts and used with multiple workloads.

Conclusion

By conducting an Operational Readiness Review (ORR), you can leverage the learnings and best practices from AWS to help reduce operational risk in your own workload. This checklist can aid in uncovering risks and help guide service teams with mitigation efforts as you strive to build resiliency into your workloads.

In addition to the ORR, we recommend that you also perform a review based on the other pillars in the Well-Architected Framework to check that your workloads are using foundational best practices for operational excellence, security, performance efficiency, reliability, and cost optimization.

Although failures may be inevitable on the path to innovation, we can all continue to leverage the collective learnings of the AWS community. If you find best practices or ORR questions that may benefit others, we would appreciate your ideas as an issue logged to the ORR Github repository.

Additional resources:

• Operational Readiness Reviews (ORR)
• What is the AWS Well-Architected Tool?
• AWS Well-Architected – Getting started video

Subscribe to the AWS Public Sector Blog newsletter to get the latest in AWS tools, solutions, and innovations from the public sector delivered to your inbox, or contact us.

Please take a few minutes to share insights regarding your experience with the AWS Public Sector Blog in this survey, and we’ll use feedback from the survey to create more content aligned with the preferences of our readers.