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Well-Architected Framework

Define and automate processes

The Define and automate processes pillar helps you establish repeatable, scalable workflows that reduce manual effort and human error while enabling teams to deliver infrastructure and applications consistently. This pillar helps you build teams and culture, develop and deploy applications, and establish operations and monitoring practices that create a foundation for all other pillars.

When you successfully implement this pillar, you transform from manual, error-prone processes to automated, reliable workflows. This transformation helps you deliver faster, more consistently, and with higher quality while building the foundation for sustainable growth and scalability. You can respond to changing demands more effectively and allocate human resources to high-value activities rather than repetitive tasks.

Why automate your processes

Automating your infrastructure and application processes addresses the following operational and business challenges:

  • Reduce deployment errors and prevent outages: Manual deployments create inconsistent configurations, missed steps, and human errors that cause production outages. A single misconfigured setting or forgotten dependency can take systems offline for hours. Process automation eliminates these errors by codifying every step, ensuring deployments execute identically every time, and reducing mean time to recovery (MTTR).

  • Accelerate delivery speed and time to market: Manual provisioning, testing, and deployment processes create bottlenecks that slow feature delivery from weeks to hours. Teams wait for infrastructure access, manually test changes, and coordinate deployments across multiple systems. Automation eliminates these wait times, enabling continuous delivery that gets features to customers faster and improves competitive advantage.

  • Scale operations without proportional headcount growth: Manual processes require linear scaling, doubling your infrastructure requires doubling the work from your operations team. This creates unsustainable costs and hiring challenges as organizations grow. Automated processes scale infinitely without additional headcount, allowing small teams to manage large, complex infrastructure environments efficiently.

  • Improve compliance, auditability, and security: Manual changes lack comprehensive audit trails, making compliance verification difficult and security incidents hard to investigate. Teams struggle to answer "who changed what, when, and why" during audits or incidents. Automation provides complete traceability through version control, enforces security policies consistently, and creates detailed logs that satisfy compliance requirements and accelerate incident response.

The complete process workflow

Process automation follows a natural progression where each step builds on the previous one to create a comprehensive automation strategy. This systematic approach ensures you establish the right foundation before moving to more advanced automation practices.

The process automation journey consists of the following five main phases that work together to create reliable, scalable workflows. Each phase addresses specific aspects of the automation transformation and prepares you for the next level of maturity.

  • Build your team culture: Establish the human foundation through high-performing teams, collaboration practices, and workflow-first thinking.
  • Define your processes and systems: Map current workflows, define infrastructure as code, and create standardized processes across teams.
  • Automate your workflows: Implement CI/CD pipelines, automate testing, and create deployment processes that eliminate manual errors.
  • Deploy with confidence: Use zero-downtime deployment strategies, blue-green deployments, and canary releases for safe, reliable deployments.
  • Monitor and operate: Set up comprehensive monitoring and alerting to ensure your automated systems run correctly and efficiently.

Application and infrastructure workflows

Both applications and infrastructure follow similar automation patterns, but with different focuses and tools. Understanding these parallel workflows helps you implement automation consistently across your entire technology stack.

Application workflow

The application automation workflow focuses on delivering software reliably and efficiently. This workflow transforms how you build, test, and deploy applications to production environments.

The application automation journey consists of the following six key steps that create a complete delivery pipeline. Each step builds on the previous one to ensure your applications move smoothly from development to production.

  • Define application delivery process: Establish how applications move from development to production with clear handoffs and responsibilities.
  • Package applications: Create containers, artifacts, or other deployable packages that ensure consistency across environments.
  • Automate testing: Implement unit, integration, and end-to-end testing that validates application functionality before deployment.
  • Implement CI/CD: Build pipelines that automatically test and deploy applications with minimal manual intervention.
  • Deploy applications: Use automated deployment strategies for safe, reliable releases that minimize downtime and risk.
  • Monitor applications: Track application performance, errors, and user experience to ensure optimal operation.

Infrastructure workflow

The infrastructure automation workflow focuses on provisioning and managing the underlying systems that support your applications. This workflow ensures your infrastructure is consistent, reliable, and can scale with your application needs.

The infrastructure automation journey consists of the following six key steps that create a complete infrastructure management pipeline. Each step ensures your infrastructure supports your application requirements while maintaining security and compliance.

  • Define infrastructure as code - Use Terraform to define your infrastructure declaratively, ensuring consistency and version control
  • Create reusable modules - Build modular, reusable infrastructure components that standardize deployments across environments
  • Automate provisioning - Use CI/CD to automatically provision and update infrastructure based on your code definitions
  • Implement infrastructure testing - Test infrastructure changes before applying them to ensure they meet your requirements
  • Deploy infrastructure - Use automated strategies for infrastructure updates that minimize risk and ensure reliability
  • Monitor infrastructure - Track infrastructure health, performance, and capacity to maintain optimal operation

Integration points

The power of process automation comes from integrating these workflows together. These integration points create a unified automation strategy that spans your entire technology stack.

The following integration points connect your application and infrastructure workflows. These connections ensure that your automation efforts work together rather than in isolation.

  • CI/CD pipelines connect application development with infrastructure provisioning, creating a unified delivery process
  • Infrastructure as code enables applications to define their own infrastructure requirements, ensuring alignment between applications and infrastructure
  • Monitoring provides visibility across both applications and infrastructure, creating a complete picture of system health
  • Security is implemented consistently across all automated processes, ensuring compliance and risk management
  • Version control tracks changes to both application code and infrastructure definitions, creating a complete audit trail

Maturity progression

Process automation typically follows a maturity progression that helps you understand where you are in your automation journey and what steps to take next. This progression provides a roadmap for continuous improvement.

The automation maturity model consists of the following five levels that represent increasing levels of automation sophistication. Each level builds on the previous one and provides the foundation for the next level of maturity.

  • Manual processes: Everything is done manually with high risk of errors and inconsistent results
  • Semi-automated: Some processes are automated while others remain manual, creating mixed efficiency gains
  • Fully automated: Most processes are automated with minimal manual intervention, providing significant efficiency improvements
  • Self-service: Teams can provision and deploy without operations involvement, enabling faster delivery and reduced bottlenecks
  • Continuous optimization: Processes are continuously improved based on data and feedback, creating a culture of ongoing enhancement

To assess your current automation maturity and learn how to progress to the next level, visit the automation maturity model.

Topics in this pillar

This pillar covers five main areas that work together to create a comprehensive process automation strategy.

  • Build your team culture creates the human foundation for successful automation through high-performing teams, collaboration practices, and workflow-first thinking.

  • Define your processes establishes the foundation by mapping current workflows, defining systems and tools, and standardizing processes before automation.

  • Automate your workflows covers strategies for automating both infrastructure and application processes, including CI/CD implementation, testing automation, and deployment processes.

  • Deploy with confidence implements atomic deployments and zero-downtime deployment strategies including blue-green, canary, and rolling deployments for safe, reliable deployments.

  • Process automation provides the automation maturity model for understanding your current automation level and progressing from manual to fully automated deployments.

  • Monitor and operate ensures your automated systems are properly monitored and operated efficiently through comprehensive monitoring and alerting.

Who needs this

Platform engineers and infrastructure architects will find this pillar essential for designing automated infrastructure platforms that can scale efficiently. These professionals need to understand how to balance automation requirements with operational constraints while building systems that can adapt to changing demands.

DevOps engineers and site reliability engineers are the primary implementers who will use this guidance to build automation systems, implement CI/CD pipelines, and establish monitoring practices. They need practical guidance on implementing specific automation practices and integrating them with existing infrastructure and applications.

Development teams and application engineers will find value in understanding how to implement automated development workflows and integrate with deployment processes. These teams need to work closely with operations teams to ensure that automation supports development velocity without compromising reliability requirements.

Team leads and engineering managers will benefit from understanding how to build high-performing teams and establish collaborative culture. These professionals need guidance on implementing team practices, communication strategies, and cultural foundations that support automation and continuous improvement.

When to focus on this pillar

Focus on this pillar when your organization experiences manual errors, inconsistent delivery, or inefficient processes. This pillar is most valuable when you have growing development needs, when manual processes are becoming a bottleneck, or when you need to improve delivery speed and quality.

Organizations that are just starting their automation journey will find this pillar particularly valuable, as it provides the foundational practices necessary for all other optimization efforts. It is also essential for organizations scaling their operations or transitioning to cloud-native architectures.

How this fits with the framework

The Define and Automate Processes pillar provides the foundational automation layer that enables all other pillars. It creates the consistency and reliability necessary for effective optimization, resilience, and security. Without automation, you risk inconsistent delivery, manual errors, and inefficient resource utilization.

This pillar establishes the team culture and collaborative practices that support all other technical implementations. When teams work effectively together and have clear communication channels, they can implement complex automation, optimization, and security practices more successfully.

The automation practices established in this pillar directly support the Secure Systems pillar by ensuring that security controls are implemented consistently and automatically. When processes are automated, you can systematically apply security policies and maintain compliance without manual intervention.

The Optimize Systems and Design Resilient Systems pillars rely on the automation foundation to implement monitoring, scaling, and failover mechanisms effectively. Automated processes create the consistency and reliability necessary for effective optimization and resilience practices.

Next steps

Learn more about each phase of the automation journey:

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