6 AWS Operational Excellence Best Practices Simplified

When a SaaS startup moved its platform to AWS, things looked great at first. Deployments were faster, the app scaled smoothly, and the dashboards showed 99.9% uptime.

But a few months in, there was an unexpected outage. There were no alerts whatsoever.

What went wrong? The startup had overlooked the AWS operational excellence best practices, part of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Many teams think moving to the cloud is enough. However, success in AWS isn’t just about spinning up EC2 instances or setting up CI/CD pipelines. It’s about building a system that runs smoothly, adapts quickly, and recovers fast when things go wrong.

In this blog, we’ll simplify the AWS operational excellence best practices. These practices can help organizations avoid blind spots, detect issues early, and operate confidently—even at scale. You’re in the right place if you’re running or building SaaS on AWS and want fewer outages, faster recoveries, and a calm, high-performing team.

What is the AWS Operational Excellence Pillar?

Imagine you’re running an app on AWS, and everything works fine until a minor update breaks production. You panic as you have no clear idea what changed. That’s precisely what the AWS operational excellence pillar can prevent.

The AWS operational excellence pillar is one of the six pillars in the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Think of it as a blueprint for building your cloud operations correctly. Here are some design principles the AWS operational excellence pillar covers so your cloud can stay reliable and adaptable as you grow.

AWS Operational Excellence Best Practices

AWS operational excellence best practices are simple, smart habits that can help you run your cloud systems efficiently.  These best practices ensure your AWS applications work reliably, efficiently, and safely, even when things go wrong.

At their core, the AWS operational excellence best practices allow organizations to be proactive rather than reactive. Here are six simplified best practices for the AWS operational excellence pillar.

1. Perform operations as code: AWS rewards environments with minimal human input. Rather than executing changes manually and increasing the risk of human error, it is better to set up the environment to allow applications, procedures, and processes to be created and maintained as codes.

2. Annotated documentation: In the cloud, providing manual instructions to the environment and the system to complete an operation is unnecessary. Rather than relying on manual inputs, creating documentation for processes and procedures that include annotations for the systems (and human administrators) to read is more effective.

3. Rely on frequent, small, and reversible changes: Rather than applying one big patch and making several consequential changes simultaneously, the recommended path is to make small changes and do things in increments. Small and frequent changes are more manageable and allow for better environmental effectiveness in the long run.

4. Evaluate and refine procedures frequently: The cloud environment allows for better monitoring and collecting comprehensive insights. Applying procedures and processes as code amplifies the ability to spot potential improvements and make constant refinement more accessible.

5. Anticipate failures: As with conventional systems, planning for the worst-case scenario is necessary. What’s different with the cloud and the AWS environment, in particular, is that organizations can test their cloud environments through different scenarios without the usual complications. This means anticipating potential failures and worst-case scenarios is also easier.

6. Learn from the failures: The pillar’s design principles also recognize that planning for everything is impossible. When parts of the system go wrong, the AWS environment setup allows for more comprehensive learning and better contingency plans for the future.

Key Areas in the AWS Operational Excellence Pillar

The AWS operational excellence pillar has three key areas that can help you keep your cloud systems running smoothly.

1. Preparation: This stage defines and implements foundational practices before deploying production workloads. It helps determine what “normal” looks like in your system.

It includes codifying infrastructure using IaC (Infrastructure as Code), implementing CI/CD pipelines, defining key metrics and KPIs, creating automated runbooks and playbooks, and designing for observability and traceability from the outset. It also establishes governance mechanisms and simulates failure scenarios to ensure the system and team are ready for real-world conditions.

2. Operation: The operation stage establishes the day-to-day running of your workloads. It refers to the real-time management of workloads in production. It includes monitoring metrics and logs using services like Amazon CloudWatch, setting up alarms and anomaly detection, and responding to incidents via automated or manual workflows. This phase ensures the safe and efficient execution of operational tasks such as deployments, patching, failovers, and scaling.

3. Evaluation: This phase involves looking at existing scenarios to learn and improve. After every deployment, incident, or significant event, you evaluate what went well and what didn’t. Did alerts fire in time? Was the rollback smooth? Could the team find the root cause fast? This is where you refine your processes, update documentation, improve your tooling, and create a feedback loop that promotes continuous improvement and operational maturity.

Ibexlabs is an AWS Advanced and Well-Architected Partner with 10+ years of experience and 150+ projects completed. Contact Ibexlabs today to fast-track your AWS Well-Architected review and remediation. Check out a comprehensive list of our services and qualifications here.