Conclusion

Operational excellence is critical to ensuring that your applications achieve their business objectives. A running theme through all of these sections is to build initially and to advance into automation and excel with full automation. There is conflicting data on this subject, but everyone has experienced major incidents as a direct result of change. Change can make up a large proportion of your major incidents. Automation of operations removes human error, and reduces the risk of change causing an incident. With techniques such as blue/green or canary deployments, this risk can also be further mitigated. By following the guidance in this document and automating your operations activities, you will see improvements to availability, security, and performance of your applications, while reducing costs.