Sep 25 2021
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Build Your Own Game Day to Support Operational Resilience

Operational resilience is your firm’s ability to provide continuous service through people, processes, and technology that are aware of and adaptive to constant change. Downtime of your mission-critical applications can not only damage your reputation, but can also make you liable to multi-million-dollar financial fines.

One way to test operational resilience is to simulate life-like system failures. An effective way to do this is by running events in your organization known as game days. Game days test systems, processes, and team responses and help evaluate your readiness to react and recover from operational issues. The AWS Well-Architected Framework recommends game days as a key strategy to develop and operate highly resilient systems because they focus not only on technology resilience issues but identify people and process gaps.

This blog post will explain how you can apply game day concepts to your workloads to help achieve a highly resilient workload.

Why does operational resilience matter from a regulatory perspective?

In March 2021, the Bank of England, Prudential Regulation Authority, and Financial Conduct Authority published their Building operational resilience: Feedback to CP19/32 and final rules policy. In this policy, operational resilience refers to a firm’s ability to prevent, adapt, and respond to and return to a steady system state when a disruption occurs. Further, firms are expected to learn and implement process improvements from prior disruptions.

This policy will not apply to everyone. However, across the board if you don’t establish operational resilience strategies, you are likely operating at an increased risk. If you have a service disruption, you may incur lost revenue and reputational damage.

What does it mean to be operationally resilient?

The final policy provides guidance on how firms should achieve operational resilience, which includes but is not limited to the following:

  • Identify and prioritize services based on the potential of intolerable harm to end consumers or risk to market integrity.
  • Define appropriate maximum impact tolerance of an important business service. This is reviewed annually using metrics to measure impact tolerance and answers questions like, “How long (in hours) can a service be offline before causing intolerable harm to end consumers?”
  • Document a complete view of all the aspects required to deliver each important service. This includes people, processes, technology, facilities, and information (resources). Firms should also test their ability to remain within the impact tolerances and provide assurance of resilience along with areas that need to be addressed.

What is a game day?

The AWS Well-Architected Framework defines a game day as follows:

“A game day simulates a failure or event to test systems, processes, and team responses. The purpose is to actually perform the actions the team would perform as if an exceptional event happened. These should be conducted regularly so that your team builds “muscle memory” on how to respond. Your game days should cover the areas of operations, security, reliability, performance, and cost.

In AWS, your game days can be carried out with replicas of your production environment using AWS CloudFormation. This enables you to test in a safe environment that resembles your production environment closely.”

Running game days that simulate system failure helps your organization evaluate and build operational resilience.

How can game days help build operational resilience?

Running a game day alone is not sufficient to ensure operational resilience. However, by navigating the following process to set up and perform a game day, you will establish a best practice-based approach for operating resilient systems.

Stage 1 – Identify key services

As part of setting up a game day event, you will catalog and identify business-critical services.

Game days are performed to test services where operational failure could result in significant financial, customer, and/or reputational impact to the firm. Game days can also evaluate other key factors, like the impact of a failure on the wider market where your firm operates.

For example, a firm may identify its digital banking mobile application from which their customers can initiate payments as one of its important business services.

Stage 2 – Map people, process, and technology supporting the business service

Game days are holistic events. To get a full picture of how the different aspects of your workload operate together, you’ll generate a detailed map of people and processes as they interact and operate the technical and non-technical components of the system. This mapping also helps your end consumers understand how you will provide them reliable support during a failure.

Stage 3 – Define and perform failure scenarios

Systems fail, and failures often happen when a system is operating at scale because various services working together can introduce complexity. To ensure operational resilience, you must understand how systems react and adapt to failures. To do this, you’ll identify and perform failure scenarios so you can understand how your systems will react and adapt and build “muscle memory” for actual events.

AWS builds to guard against outages and incidents, and accounts for them in the design of AWS services—so when disruptions do occur, their impact on customers and the continuity of services is as minimal as possible. At AWS, we employ compartmentalization throughout our infrastructure and services. We have multiple constructs that provide different levels of independent, redundant components.

Stage 4 – Observe and document people, process, and technology reactions

In running a failure scenario, you’ll observe how technological and non-technological components react to and recover from failure. This helps you identify failures and fix them as they cascade through impacted components across your workload. This also helps identify technical and operational challenges that might not otherwise be obvious.

Stage 5 – Conduct lessons learned exercises

Game days generate information on people, processes, and technology and also capture data on customer impact, incident response and remediation timelines, contributing factors, and corrective actions. By incorporating these data points into the system design process, you can implement continuous resilience for critical systems.

How to run your own game day in AWS

You may have heard of AWS GameDay events. This is an AWS organized event for our customers. In this team-based event, AWS provides temporary AWS accounts running fictional systems. Failures are injected into these systems and teams work together on completing challenges and improving the system architecture.

However, the method and tooling and principles we use to conduct AWS GameDays are agnostic and can be applied to your systems using the following services:

  • AWS Fault Injection Simulator is a fully managed service that runs fault injection experiments on AWS, which makes it easier to improve an application’s performance, observability, and resiliency.
  • Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.
  • AWS X-Ray helps you analyze and debug production and distributed applications (such as those built using a microservices architecture). X-Ray helps you understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors.

Please note you are not limited to the tools listed for simulating failure scenarios. For complete coverage of failure scenarios, we encourage you to explore additional tools and strategies.

Figure 1 shows a reference architecture example that demonstrates conducting a game day for an Open Banking implementation.

Game day reference architecture example

Figure 1. Game day reference architecture example

Game day operators use Fault Injection Simulator to catalog and perform failure scenarios to be included in your game day. For example, in our Open Banking use case in Figure 1, a failure scenario might be for the business API functions servicing Open Banking requests to abruptly stop working. You can also combine such simple failure scenarios into a more complex one with failures injected across multiple components of the architecture.

Game day participants use CloudWatch, X-Ray, and their own custom observability and monitoring tooling to identify failures as they cascade through systems.

As you go through the process of identifying, communicating, and fixing issues, you’ll also document impact of failures on end-users. From there, you’ll generate lessons learned to holistically improve your workload’s resilience.

Conclusion

In this blog, we discussed the significance of ensuring operational resilience. We demonstrated how to set up game days and how they can supplement your efforts to ensure operational resilience. We discussed how using AWS services such as Fault Injection Simulator, X-Ray, and CloudWatch can be used to facilitate and implement game day failure scenarios.

Ready to get started? For more information, check out our AWS Fault Injection Simulator User Guide.

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