If you’re a content marketer, or a leader in digital transformations, what you have in common is an interest in customer-facing assets – whether that’s websites, mobile apps or another kind of application.
If you’re a content marketer, you probably won’t have heard of a WAR review (an AWS Well-Architected Review).
And if you’re a leader in digital transformations, you probably will.
What neither of you may know, however, is how one element of the WAR review, the operations pillar, can be a turnaround point for getting new features out on these assets quickly and reliably.
Because there’s a tendency – and a totally understandable one – to think that anything to do with infrastructure is a little bit tech-y, and grisly, and under-the-hood, and, especially from a marketing perspective, something that should be left to someone else.
What we’ve found is that walking customers through just this one of the five steps of a WAR is like shining an ultraviolet light into an ostensibly spiffy hotel room: there’s stains and splotches and dubious blots all over the place. But once noticed. They’re not at all hard to clean up.
Which in this context means it’s not all hard to spot the reasons you can’t get really great content out quickly to your customers (and to fix them).
So what is a WAR?
A Well-Architected review is essentially a building code audit for your infrastructure.
Just like how builders have codes to help them build buildings which don’t fall over, or don’t electrocute you when you take a shower, cloud engineers have codes which help them build infrastructure that’s really really good.
When we do a WAR, we’re really just coming in and seeing what’s been built or imagined well and what hasn’t.
The codes themselves – which you can skip if you’re not interested, or read more here – are called, in a review, pillars, and there are five them:
- Operational Excellence
- Security
- Cost Optimization
- Reliability
- Performance Efficiency
As you can imagine, these break down into smaller and more technically complex infrastructure tactics and practices – but it’s operational excellence we want to talk to you about.
Why is the operational excellence pillar so useful to content marketers and digital transformation leaders?
To answer this question, we’re going to have to jump into the nitty-gritty of what makes up the ops pillar.
From a tech perspective, we have:
- Perform operations as code
- Make frequent small, reversible changes
- Refine operations procedures frequently
- Anticipate failure
- Learn from all operational failures
Perform operations as code (IaC) is by far the most technical and we promise that after this one it’ll get less grisly, and more dazzling and empowering and tra la la.
It just means making it so your infrastructure can be written as code. So you write it. As code. And then it appears.
The subsequent points all have tech-y delivery mechanisms – there are tools for slimming your changes and refining processes, etc – but they can all essentially be understood as written.
And this is where, hopefully, you become precognizant of the pleasant exposure of all your unsightly stains and flaws, and we hope, wildly jubilant and excited about our promise of a painless go-around with a J-cloth and a little bottle of domestic-grade surface cleanser.
Because, to most content marketing and digital transformation people we speak to, the above list, inverted, reads exactly like a rap sheet:
‘Are your changes small?’ ‘No.’
‘Are they reversible?’ ‘Yes, with great effort and panic and a significant impact to users.’
‘Did you learn from your last operational failure?’ ‘We had, until today, considered it a great success.’
We don’t mean to gloat.
The truth is, when you’re in charge of something like a household name website – the kind of name you can mention at parties and reliably watch everyone else’s eyes go green – the fantasy is often in the same order of ‘sexiness.’
You tend to picture the thing where the webcam scans users’ faces and reflects back a more attractive, hip-looking doppelganger wearing your company’s shades.
Or you picture an AI thing.
Or you picture (and perhaps whatever the word is for imagined smell (phantosmia, it turns out)) Boursin’s award-winning, virtual reality and multisensory soft cheese sensorium. Who wouldn’t?
And but so the above stuff, grisly and tech-y and admittedly somewhat boring, gets pushed to the back of the mental queue.
What we’re saying, and as you can probably guess guess is our closing point, is that all that funner stuff is underpinned by robust deployments, and exactly the kind of fiddly details that get smoothed out when you do a WAR.
There are organisational elements too – some more cultural than tech-y – but honestly, we find that in a large number of cases, it’s the very simple stuff that’s preventing the very big and impressive stuff from getting done.
So our advice to you would be to book a review. See how much you’ve got to get straight. And, in the meantime, try and come up with something better than this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=54&v=XRik3h5M-qU&feature=emb_logo
