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Operational Excellence

Operational Excellence is the ability to run and monitor workloads reliably, and to continually improve processes and procedures.

On Cleura Cloud this means treating infrastructure as code, standardizing deployments, and being able to respond to and learn from operational events.

Design principles

  • Manage infrastructure as code so changes are reviewable, repeatable, and reversible.
  • Standardize and automate deployments through reusable templates and Infrastructure as Code rather than manual configuration.
  • Make frequent, small, reversible changes rather than large, risky ones.
  • Anticipate and plan for operational failure with documented runbooks.
  • Learn from every operational event and feed it back into procedures.

Applying this on Cleura Cloud

  • Use Cleura’s Launch Pad (via Heat, Ansible, or OpenTofu) to bootstrap initial connectivity into a new environment.
  • It creates an SSH keypair, a router and network with public access, and a restrictable jump host.
  • It is a convenient entry point, not a landing zone.
  • Project structure, quotas, IAM boundaries, and a security baseline still need to be set up separately using the practices in this framework.
  • Provision and manage resources through the Cleura Cloud Management Panel (CCMP), CLI, or API.
  • Drive routine provisioning through Infrastructure-as-Code rather than manual clicks, so changes are auditable and repeatable.
  • Use OpenStack projects to cleanly separate development, test, and production environments, and to scope team access to only what each group needs.
  • Using IaC as the standard for your infrastructure deployments. It provides a consistent, standard methodology for development and deployment for all components of your workload.
  • Build golden images or make use public cloud images and use a tool like ansible to make your hardening, configuration, upgrades.
  • Integrate CI/CD pipelines with Cleura’s managed Kubernetes (Gardener) clusters for automated, auditable application deployment.
  • Where internal operations capacity is limited, offload monitoring, patching, and backup management to Cleura Managed Services so your team can focus on the application layer.
  • Use Cleura’s architects and consultants for design reviews, migrations, or CI/CD integration work that benefits from platform-specific expertise.

Self-assessment checklist

  • Is infrastructure provisioned through code or API calls rather than ad hoc manual changes?
  • If the project used Cleura’s Launch Pad to bootstrap connectivity, have the project structure, IAM, quotas, and a security baseline been set up separately? Launch Pad itself does not provide these.
  • Do you have documented, tested runbooks for common operational events (failover, scale-out, incident response)?
  • Are environments (dev/test/prod) cleanly separated using projects?
  • Do deployments happen through a CI/CD pipeline rather than manual steps?
  • After an incident, is there a process to feed lessons back into runbooks and architecture?