Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)

Source: My personal notes from Microsoft course with cloud team

Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) Introduction

Business needs:

Improved availability
Priority is reliability
Stability
Automation

Why is Cloud Adoption Important?

Goal: digital transformation affecting:
- Customers
- Transform products to meet users
- Operations optimization
Areas for digital transformation:
- Vision
  - People, Process, Technology
  - Transformation balance stability with speed and results
- Culture
- Organization’s unique selling point
- Capabilities
  - Security
  - Monitoring

Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure

Framework is on top of all work; not project or application specific.

Phases:

Strategy
Plan
- Assets
Ready
- Cloud
- Landing areas
- Practice, training
Adopt
- Migration
- Best practices
- Improvements

Supports:

Governance
- Methods
Manage
- Baseline
- Maturity

Cloud Adoption Motivations

Organization changes
Leave data centres
- Migrate existing workloads
- Reduce infrastructure footprint
Reduce capital costs
End of support of technologies
Compliance
- Security
Service improvements
- Increased availability
- Staff productivity
- Availability

CAF Phases

Strategy

Build business case

Motivation
Business reasons
- Check KPIs of business
  - Example: Increased observability, DR options, faster changes
Financial, technical benefits
- Check your costs/benefits and measure the “transformation value” of cloud adoption
Microsoft has tools and templates to support planning

Plan

Rationalize
Align with organization
Skills gap and readiness plan
Cloud adoption plan, maturity

Ready

Understand:

Operating model
Design area
Implementation options
- Greenfield (new), Brownfield (mixed)
Azure landing zones
- Azure multi-subscription environment that is designed for:
  - Scale
  - Security
  - Network
  - Practices
- Design principles:
  - Subscription freedom and delegate responsibility
  - Policy driven governance
  - Single control and management plane
  - Application centric, archetype neutral
  - Azure native design and platform roadmap alignment
- Azure Landing Zone Design Areas:
  - Billing
  - Identity access management
  - Resource organization
  - Network
  - Security
  - Governance
  - Management
  - Automation
  - OPS specific: Many of the landing zone areas looks controlled by ITS. There are areas we share with ITS like resource organization, security and automation.

Adopt

Assess workloads –> Deploy –> Release
Migration in releases
Migration patterns:
- Re-host (forklift)
- Refactor
- Re-architect
- Rebuild
- Replace
App and data modernization

Secure

Access, Asset security and governance
Foundation and continuous improvement
Develop in an agile/sprint way due to large scope, minimum viable product

Govern

Current vs future state governance
- Roadmap 3-5 years
Governance tools
- Azure native tools for cost, security, identity, resource consistency, deployment like Azure services:
  - Cost
  - Security
  - Blueprints
  - Advisor
  - RBAC
  - AD
  - Directory
  - Policy
  - Monitor
  - Change tracking
  - DSC
  - ARM Templates
  - Automation
  - Policy
  - Resource tagging
  - DevOps
  - Site Recovery
  - Backup
Iteratively add controls to address risks

Manage

Methodology to enable cloud management
Culture and organization
- Cloud “Centre of Excellence” for innovation, implementation

Azure Well-Architected Framework

Cost optimization
Operations
Performance efficiency
Reliability
Security

Microsoft consult is available to apply the Azure Well-Architected Framework to an example solution.