Improve your reliability with modern operations practices

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• Express why reliability is crucial to your success
• Describe modern operations practices that offer tools you can use to work on your reliability challenges
• Explain the Dickerson hierarchy of reliability and the map it provides for approaching reliability challenges

In this module you will:

• Learn how to increase your operational awareness as a precursor to reliability work
• Expand your understanding of reliability itself
• Change the way you frame your thinking about monitoring to make it more impactful
• Gain a basic understanding of the applicable monitoring platform and tools available on Azure
• Learn a practice from site reliability engineering that can immediately start to create an impact on reliability
• Learn to craft actionable alerts to make your operational practices sustainable

In this module you will:

• Learn the importance of effective incident response
• Gain an understanding of the lifecycle of an incident so we know just how to apply our efforts
• Learn the building blocks for constructing an incident response process that allows us to respond with urgency.
• Begin to track your incidents effectively using Azure DevOps tools.
• Explore ways to automate your incident tracking for a speedy and consistent response
• Understand the guidelines around communication that allow incident response to be more efficient
• Visit some Azure tools that can significantly speed up your remediation times during an incident

In this module you will:

• Discover the importance of learning from incidents
• Understand the aspects of complex systems that make learning from failure important
• Learn when and how to conduct a post-incident review
• Understand the purpose and goals of a post-incident review
• Learn the components that go into a good post-incident review
• Explore the Azure tools that can assist with getting started with post-incident reviews
• Become aware of common traps to avoid
• Identify helpful practices to conduct a better review

In this module you will:

• Learn about what software deployment is and different kinds of deployments we might employ
• Discover the significant benefits of switching from an "epic deployment" model to a "continuous deployment" model
• Explore the components of continuous deployment
• Look deep into pipelines and how they are implemented in Azure Pipelines
• Learn a number of different strategies for deployment to production that can help us avoid incidents
• Examine some important best practices that can minimize the risk when rolling out new software or a new version of existing software

In this module you will:

• Learn about scalability and the scalability/reliability relationship
• Understand the role of capacity planning in preparing for growth
• Learn basic concepts and fundamental terms related to scaling
• Eliminate single points of failure
• Understand the different kinds of growth and how to respond to them
• Be able to measure capacity in the cloud
• Catch issues with service limits and quotas before they emerge using Azure tools
• Understand important steps to take before beginning work on scaling
• List techniques for making an application more scalable includingdecoupling, queues, in-memory caching and database sharding
• Learn about the Azure tools that make it possible to take yourapplication or service global

• Introduction
• Why reliability matters
• Modern operations
• The Dickerson hierarchy of reliability
• Summary

• Introduction
• Operational awareness
• Expanding our understanding of reliability
• Changing the frame
• Azure monitoring tools
• Log analytics and KQL queries
• Service level indicators (SLIs) and service level objectives (SLOs)
• Actionable alerts
• Summary

• Introduction
• Importance of incident response
• Characteristics and lifecycle of an incident
• Foundations of incident response
• Incident tracking
• Communication and collaboration
• Remediation
• Summary

• Introduction
• Why learn from incidents?
• What is a post-incident review?
• Characteristics and components of a good post-incident review
• The post-incident review process
• Common traps to avoid
• Helpful practices for learning from failure
• Summary

• Introduction
• What is software deployment?
• The continuous delivery deployment model
• Test automation and the delivery pipeline
• Deployment strategies
• Summary

• Introduction
• What is scalability?
• Prepare for growth
• Capacity planning considerations
• Make applications scalable
• Go global
• Summary