# 07 Operations

How a platform is run day to day: scheduling and coordinating pipelines, moving changes safely from development to production, knowing when something is wrong and what "on time" means, keeping costs under control, recovering when things go badly wrong, declaring infrastructure as code, and moving from one platform to another.

> [!NOTE]
>
> **Before starting**
>
> [04 Modelling and transformation](<https://wiki.4tm0.net/data/section-modeling.html>) and [05 Governance and security](<https://wiki.4tm0.net/data/section-governance.html>), in particular [dbt](<https://wiki.4tm0.net/data/dbt.html>), [Testing data pipelines](<https://wiki.4tm0.net/data/testing-data-pipelines.html>) and [Data quality dimensions](<https://wiki.4tm0.net/data/data-quality-dimensions.html>). The optional pages on cost and disaster recovery also build on [02 Storage](<https://wiki.4tm0.net/data/section-storage.html>); Infrastructure as code and Platform migration need only the pages of this section.

## Pages, in reading order

1. [Orchestration](<https://wiki.4tm0.net/data/orchestration.html>): Orchestration decides when each step of the platform's pipelines runs, in what order, and what happens when a step fails.
2. [Environments and CI](<https://wiki.4tm0.net/data/environments-and-ci.html>): Separate environments, such as development, test and production, let changes to pipelines be built and checked before they affect real consumers; continuous integration (CI) runs those checks automatically on every proposed change.
3. [Observability and SLOs](<https://wiki.4tm0.net/data/observability-and-slos.html>): Observability is being able to tell, from the signals a system emits, whether it is healthy and why it is not; service level objectives (SLOs) state in numbers what healthy means for consumers.
4. [Cost and FinOps](<https://wiki.4tm0.net/data/cost-finops.html>) (optional): Understanding where a data platform's money goes, attributing it to the teams and products that cause it, and reducing it safely, as a shared routine of engineering and finance called FinOps.
5. [Disaster recovery](<https://wiki.4tm0.net/data/disaster-recovery.html>) (optional): Being able to restore the platform's data and service after a serious failure, such as a deleted table, corrupted data, a lost catalog or an unavailable region, within agreed limits on lost data and downtime.
6. [Infrastructure as code](<https://wiki.4tm0.net/data/infrastructure-as-code.html>) (optional): Declaring the platform's infrastructure, such as buckets, catalogs, clusters, roles and permissions, in version-controlled files, and letting tools create and update it to match, instead of configuring it by hand.
7. [Platform migration](<https://wiki.4tm0.net/data/platform-migration.html>) (optional): Moving data, pipelines and consumers from one platform to another, such as from a legacy warehouse to a lakehouse, without breaking what people depend on.

## Previous and next section

[06 Serving](<https://wiki.4tm0.net/data/section-serving.html>) · [08 Data science and ML](<https://wiki.4tm0.net/data/section-ml-ai.html>)