The Operational Excellence pillar includes the ability to support the development and run workloads effectively, gain insight into their operation, and continuously improve supporting processes and procedures to deliver business value. Key topics include automating changes, responding to events, and defining standards to manage daily operations.

There are five design principles for operational excellence in the cloud:

• Perform operations as code
• Make frequent, small, reversible changes
• Refine operations procedures frequently
• Anticipate failure
• Learn from all operational failures