The ability to support development and run workloads effectively, gain insight into operations, and continuously improve supporting processes and procedures to deliver business value. Key areas include IaC, deployment pipelines, monitoring, incident response, and runbooks.

Protecting information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies. Includes identity and access management, detective controls, infrastructure protection, data protection, and incident response.

The ability of a workload to perform its intended function correctly and consistently when expected, including the ability to recover from failures and meet demand. Covers foundations, workload architecture, change management, and failure management.

The ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and maintain efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve. Includes selection, review, monitoring, and tradeoffs of compute, storage, database, and network resources.

Running systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point. Practice cloud financial management, expenditure and usage awareness, cost-effective resources, and managing demand and supply. Includes right-sizing, reserved instances, and spot instances.

Minimizing environmental impacts of running cloud workloads. Focus on energy efficiency, maximizing utilization, selecting efficient resources, reducing downstream impacts, and understanding total cost of ownership including environmental impact.

Deploy, operate, monitor, and manage cloud workloads effectively. Includes release engineering, monitoring, incident management, and continuous improvement. Use Cloud Operations Suite (formerly Stackdriver) for comprehensive observability.

Protect data and systems with layered security controls. Implement zero-trust security model, encrypt data at rest and in transit, manage access with IAM, and maintain compliance with regulatory requirements using Security Command Center.

Design resilient systems that meet availability and recovery objectives. Use regional and multi-regional deployment, implement graceful degradation, design for failure, and test recovery procedures regularly with Chaos Engineering principles.

Maximize business value while minimizing costs. Use committed use discounts, sustained use discounts, preemptible VMs, right-sizing, and Cloud Billing for cost visibility. Implement budgets, alerts, and cost allocation labels.

Design systems for optimal performance and efficiency. Select appropriate compute, storage, and network resources, implement caching strategies, optimize data access patterns, and use performance monitoring to identify bottlenecks.