Muditha and I officially kicked off the first actual episode of our channel after the introduction of the channel last week.
In this episode, we talk about the cloud adoption framework.
So, what exactly is the Cloud Adoption Framework? The CAF is proven guidance and best practices that help you confidently adopt the cloud and achieve business outcomes. This was formed as a result of consolidated knowledge gathered from Engineers supporting partners, partners supporting customers and customers asking questions about how to best adopt a cloud infrastructure according to best practices. Customers wanted to know the industry standard for implementing azure resources in a sustainable/repeatable manner that is both secure and scalable.
There are many options and ways to adopt the cloud, every organisation’s journey to the cloud is unique and is defined by business needs and priorities.
The main key roles that would find this useful are technical decision makers and cloud architects but leaving the designations aside, it’s for anyone interested in getting started with a good solid foundation. It assists in answering questions like how do I get started and who needs to be involved are there any resources to get me started? Etc.
The CAF structure is a modular structure, and it consists of six main methodologies. They are namely Strategy, Plan Ready, Adopt, Govern and Management.
Strategy is about understanding why one plan to move to the cloud, the business motivations, and the drivers. The planning phase is about understanding the current digital estate, the people who need to be involved, what needs to be moved, finding out the skills gap and coming out with an action plan that acts as the single source of truth. The ready phase is about preparing the environment with governance and compliance. This is also the phase in which you would set up the Landing Zone. The next phase is the Adopt phase. In this, we deploy the workloads to the cloud. Then we have the Govern and Management Phases which will ensure phases plan ready and adopt have the proper guard rails and well-governed footprint according to best practices.
Microsoft has provided tools and templates to help with the cloud adoption journey. The Assessments are Q and A-based tools to understand where one is and to get pointed to the right place to start at. Some of the tools discussed are the Cloud Journey Tracker, Strategic Migration Assessment and Readiness Tool and Governance Benchmark.
In addition, we looked at the Azure landing zone blueprints, Enterprise Scale Landing Zone KU and the Terraform Module and ended the discussion with a list of tools and templates that can be used during each phase.
Next week we will discuss the first two phases of the CAF, Strategy and Planning, where we will be looking at how best we can deploy management groups subscriptions, resource groups, naming conventions etc. and some of the thinking behind it. Looking forward to seeing you guys there.
You can watch the full episode below.