Azure Cloud Adoption Framework Handbook E-Book

Sasa Kovacevic

• Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 380

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

You've heard about the benefits of the cloud and you want to get on board, but you’re not sure where to start, what services to use, or how to make sure your data is safe. Making the decision to move to the cloud can be daunting and it's easy to get overwhelmed, but if you're not careful, you can easily make mistakes that cost you time and money.
Azure Cloud Adoption Framework Handbook is here to help. This guide will take you step-by-step through the process of making the switch to the Microsoft Azure cloud. You’ll learn everything from foundational cloud concepts and planning workload migration through to upskilling and organization transformation. As you advance, you’ll find out how to identify and align your business goals with the most suitable cloud technology options available. The chapters are designed in a way to enable you to plan for a smooth transition, while minimizing disruption to your day-to-day operations. You’ll also discover how the cloud can help drive innovation in your business or enable modern software development practices such as microservices and CI/CD. Throughout the chapters, you’ll see how decision makers can interact with other internal stakeholders to achieve success through the power of collaboration.
By the end of this book, you’ll be more informed and less overwhelmed about moving your business to the cloud.

Leseprobe

Azure Cloud Adoption Framework Handbook

A comprehensive guide to adopting and governing the cloud for your digital transformation

Sasa Kovacevic

Darren Dempsey

BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI

Azure Cloud Adoption Framework Handbook

Copyright © 2023 Packt Publishing

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To my friends Julijana (aka Julie), Goran (aka Smile), and Amir (aka an absolute legend), for keeping me sane and all the fun times we have. To my friend Kreso (and his extended family) for all the fun times we have and all the life lessons we learned together. To my mother, Mirjana, for all the sacrifices she made so I can be the man I am today. To all my friends and colleagues at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and elsewhere for keeping the cloud exciting. To everyone in Ireland, for making me feel as much as home here as I was in Croatia.

– Sasa Kovacevic

To all my friends and colleagues who have been such a great source of support and encouragement over the years; thank you for all the sage advice, positive energy, and boundless enthusiasm – without you, this book would not exist. To my children, Jack, Ryan, and Eva, with their constant inquisitiveness and loose grips; thanks for giving me a reason to learn how to repair many electronic devices. And of course, to my beloved wife, Paula, whose patience and unwavering belief in me has kept me going all these years.

– Darren Dempsey

Note from the authors

Welcome to the cloud adoption journey. With this book, we will explore the myriad of opportunities available to businesses and organizations looking to harness the power of the cloud. For those who are new to cloud computing, it is important to understand the components involved in a successful transition. This book is designed to introduce cloud adoption through Azure, Microsoft’s robust cloud platform specifically designed for enterprise-scale projects and operations.

This book will include a detailed exploration of the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF). The CAF is an integrated set of resources that allow businesses to plan and govern their Azure environment as well as manage costs and ensure scalability. It provides an actionable roadmap that guides customers through every step of their cloud adoption journey—from planning to migration and optimization.

Finally, this book will include numerous anecdotes from real experience of successfully implementing Azure—providing readers with a wealth of practical examples from which they can draw inspiration and guidance during their own cloud adoption journey.

We aim to make your Azure journey smoother than ever before—simplifying the complexities associated with migrating workloads while simultaneously ensuring long-term scalability and that security compliance standards and cost optimization goals are met along the way. We hope you find this book helpful in your journey toward embracing the cloud!

Contributors

About the authors

Sasa Kovacevic is a cloud architect with certifications in all three hyperscale clouds. He loves teaching others and architecting cloud-native solutions as well as innovating how things are done across industries. Sasa’s favorite Azure service is SignalR. He can be found on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasakovacevic/) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/__S) and would love to hear from you.

Darren Dempsey is a 25+ year veteran of the software industry, with a career that has seen him architect and develop mission-critical systems for clients in financial services, retail, telecoms, and travel. A self-professed “nerd,” Darren’s passion lies in solving complex technical challenges, which he has been doing since he was first introduced to computers as a youngster. A keen focus on user experience, system reliability, performance engineering, and keeping things simple drives Darren to continuously innovate and push boundaries.

About the reviewers

Darren O’Neill heads cloud operations at a leading insurance software company, delivering a diverse portfolio of cloud services, including AI, big data, and core components such as security and storage. He leads an expanding team, ensuring reliable support for customers’ critical workloads. With a decade of experience in finance and expertise in building secure cloud systems, Darren holds an MSc in cloud computing and an MBA from the National College of Ireland.

Francesco Bianchi is a visual coach and Agile thinker on a mission to make the world of work more fun. His current focus is on building learning experiences in a safe and inclusive environment by leveraging all of the cutting-edge techniques for visual thinking, brain-based learning, and facilitation for highly collaborative meetings to ensure people are and feel at the center.

David Pazdera is a principal cloud and DevOps architect with over 20 years of experience ranging from operations and administration and project delivery to solution design and cloud architecture with a focus on the design and implementation of complex infrastructure environments. He works daily with Azure and IT process automation, cloud governance, and “everything as code.” Over the last couple of years, he has been responsible for driving large migration projects to Azure and implementations of Azure landing zones. Before joining Devoteam, he worked for 6.5 years at Microsoft as a senior cloud solution architect. He is also a public speaker with a profile available at Sessionize at the handle pazdedav.

Table of Contents

Preface

Part 1: The Why

1

Introducing … the Cloud

Who are you?

Who are we?

What is this book about?

By the way, a convention to be on the lookout for…

Are you ready?

Assumptions

Cloud foundations

Cloud concepts

Cloud security and data privacy

Cloud services

Cloud workload types

Cloud pricing

Cloud support

What is the Cloud Adoption Framework?

Summary

2

Adopting a Strategy for Success

Why do we need a strategy?

Key performance indicators

Goodheart’s Law

Itemizing business outcomes

Adoption scenarios

Cloud adoption scenario for a traditional enterprise

Cloud adoption scenario for a new start-up

Cloud adoption scenario for running a modern SaaS platform

What not to do

Summary

Part 2: The Plan

3

Framing Your Adoption

Cloud Adoption Framework

Strategy

Plan

Ready

Adopt

Govern and Manage

The adoption journey

Form teams

Align your organization

Adopt the cloud

Summary

4

Migrating Workloads

Understanding migration scenarios

Examining migration tools

Understanding networking

Understanding VMs

Examining containerization

What is container orchestration?

Exploring container registries

Looking at Azure DevOps

Staying agile with Azure DevOps

Migrating your source code

Summary

5

Becoming Cloud Native

Cloud native development

Architecture

Services

Agility

Innovation

Summary

6

Transforming Your Organization

Organizational transformation

How to adapt the Cloud Adoption Framework for your organization and vice versa

Site reliability engineering

Cloud governance

Communication planning

Communicating during an emergency

Summary

Part 3: The Execution and Iteration

7

Creating a New Operating Model

Understanding cloud operating models

Roles and responsibilities

Governance and compliance

Service delivery management

Keeping operational documentation updated

Reviewing training and education programs

Understanding landing zones

What is an Azure subscription?

Azure Active Directory

Examining Azure management groups

Considering Azure Policy

Protecting your cloud with Microsoft Defender

Bringing it all together

Understanding migration

Summary

8

Architecting Your Cloud

Azure Well-Architected Framework

What questions to ask

What decisions to make

How to organize your teams

Cost management and optimization

Which questions to ask

What decisions to make

How to organize your teams

Operational excellence

Which questions to ask

What decisions to make

How to organize your teams

Performance efficiency

Which questions to ask

What decisions to make

How to organize your teams

Security

Which questions to ask

What decisions to make

How to organize your teams

Architecture reviews

Evolution

Azure is changing

Summary

9

Closing Thoughts

Reviewing Chapter 1, Introducing ... the Cloud

Reviewing Chapter 2, Adopting A Strategy For Success

Reviewing Chapter 3, Framing Your Adoption

Reviewing Chapter 4, Migrating Workloads

Reviewing Chapter 5, Becoming Cloud Native

Reviewing Chapter 6, Transforming Your Organization

Reviewing Chapter 7, Creating a New Operating Model

Reviewing Chapter 8, Architecting Your Cloud

Summing up

Index

Other Books You May Enjoy

Preface

With the Cloud Adoption Framework, companies can move beyond just understanding cloud computing and put it into practical use. You’ll find a wealth of best practices online – this book helps you make sense of it all! Get ready to learn how to conveniently transition your organization’s data onto the cloud while explaining every step of the journey on an executive level as well as a technical one.

Our focus is on the tech and organizational transformation needed for successful cloud adoption. We’ll explore ways to build a comprehensive strategy that gets approval, addresses those with reservations, and creates an actionable plan that can drive continuous results even in 2025. Together, we will assess existing practices/processes so they are ready to be replaced once this journey into the cloud begins!

Uncover the tangible implications of cloud adoption and digital transformation to benefit from streamlined, safe operations with fast-paced agility. Dive into real case studies – an enterprise firm, a start-up business, as well as a challenged implementation experience – to craft strategies that align team goals while remaining robustly automated within the cloud environment. Use these insights to achieve peace of mind knowing every interaction is secure without compromising on speed or performance excellence.

Get deep insights into your cloud architecture, diagnose any issues as they arise, and have up-to-date knowledge to deliver measured solutions. Acquire mastery of governance, security, and privacy protocols alongside performance optimization techniques while also knowing when and how Azure services can be deployed correctly to enhance communications within teams or with customers if needed. Organize groups across the organization for better collaboration on uncharted territory – leveraging individual ideas for effective problem-solving strategies!

With this book, you’ll have the tools to set your cloud adoption journey on the right path. Carefully selected patterns will deliver a smooth transition experience while avoiding potential pitfalls along the way. By its conclusion, you’ll be armed with an intricate knowledge of how best to tackle and succeed in whatever challenges arise throughout forthcoming cloud migration processes!

Who this book is for

Transformative technologies such as cloud computing present a unique challenge for decision-makers. From IT managers and system architects to chief experience officers (CXOs) and program managers – this book provides actionable strategies for those looking to optimize their organization’s cloud adoption journey or get back on course. Chapters provide invaluable insights into how decision-makers can interact with other internal stakeholders in order to achieve success through the power of collaboration.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introducing…the Cloud, talks about how you will find this book helpful. It covers the structure guide, learning objectives, and assumptions. You will be introduced to foundational cloud concepts, key Azure services for workloads, app dev, and governance (an introduction to the Well-Architected Framework). It will briefly review Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and application platforms such as Heroku.

Chapter 2, Adopting a Strategy for Success, helps you understand adoption scenarios for enterprises (predominately business IT with large existing investments), start-ups (greenfields with little to migrate), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform/modern application development (could be a start-up or a unit of a larger enterprise), and common pitfalls (anti-patterns).

Chapter 3, Framing Your Adoption, discusses the Cloud Adoption Framework problem statement (the need), walks through the adoption phases, and looks at alternative approaches (anti-patterns). You will review technology and people readiness, learn how to identify the known unknowns (gaps), and start to understand how disruptive cloud adoption will be.

Chapter 4, Migrating Workloads, discusses building a portfolio/inventory of workloads, reviews Azure migration services, and helps you learn how to assess different options and select the best in line with your strategy.

Chapter 5, Becoming Cloud Native, helps you understand how the cloud enables modern development practices such as microservices and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD). It explores opportunities to drive innovation within the organization through greater flexibility, openness, and agility.

Chapter 6, Transforming Your Organization, assesses existing accountability lines across the organization, defines the target state (roles and responsibilities and teams), identifies required skills and learning paths, and redefines key performance indicators (KPIs).

Chapter 7, Creating a New Operating Model, talks about the beginning of the transformation and shows the path toward the new cloud operating model.

Chapter 8, Architecting Your Cloud, delivers a walk-through of the Well-Architected Framework, covering each pillar in detail, including both the technology and culture dimensions.

Chapter 9, Closing Thoughts, contains conclusions, a wrap-up, and further reading recommendations.

To get the most out of this book

We will strive to align everyone’s understanding of the cloud adoption journey, but it is assumed that you will possess a basic knowledge of software architecture, cloud architecture, and organizational change management concepts (albeit with limited experience).

It is assumed that the organization has a general desire to move toward cloud computing and, therefore, already understands concepts such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Additionally, topics such as software-defined networking, Azure services (e.g., compute and storage), SQL versus NoSQL databases, DevOps, and CI/CD should be familiar. We may mention these throughout but will not dive into further detail about them.

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/kElDA.

Conventions used

Following is a text convention used throughout this book.

Anecdotes

Appear like this.

Get in touch

Feedback from our readers is always welcome.

General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book, email us at [email protected] and mention the book title in the subject of your message.

Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit www.packtpub.com/support/errata and fill in the form.

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If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit authors.packtpub.com.

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Part 1: The Why

In today’s digital age, adopting cloud technology is no longer a luxury, but we believe it to be a necessity. Organizations that fail to adopt cloud technology risk being left behind by their competition. In this part of the book, we offer a crash course in the cloud and why you should adopt it and offer practical advice and insights for organizations looking to define a successful cloud adoption strategy.

This part of the book comprises the following chapters:

Chapter 1, Introducing … The CloudChapter 2, Adopting a Strategy for Success

1

Introducing … the Cloud

Welcome, you absolute legend!

If you consider how many people don’t read books, and fewer still read specifically to educate themselves further rather than to entertain themselves, it is a miraculous thing indeed that you are reading this sentence.

The fact that you have chosen this book – hopefully because of a recommendation by a peer either directly or in an online community you frequent – means we were destined to meet, and it means you are already in the top 1% of people in our field who love learning and staying on top of their game.

Thank you for taking the time to read through these pages. Hopefully, we can provide some of the education you seek and add a little entertainment along the way. Now, let us get right to the point as your time is precious – and the cloud won’t adopt itself. Let’s learn together about everything that needs to happen for an organization (your organization) to successfully adopt the cloud.

Throughout this chapter, you will learn about the authors and why this book exists. We will help you identify gaps in cloud foundational knowledge and guide you to resources that can help you better understand the cloud and ultimately this book.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

Who are you?Who are we?What is this book about?Are you ready?What are the cloud foundations?What is the Cloud Adoption Framework?

Who are you?

As any good editor or publisher will tell you, the success of any book hinges on the careful selection of the target audience. We’ve painstakingly chosen a goal for each and every section, recommendation, and suggestion outlined in this book. But wait, don’t worry! That’s where you come in. Simply engage your critical thinking skills and soak it all in. Piece of cake, right?

You hopefully take on one of these three personas, professionally:

An architect that is going to be leading their organization through an incredible and exciting change, through a digital transformation (warning: buzzwords).

Your job isn’t just to architect the platform, plan a landing zone, architect services that work together like clockwork, and ensure governance going forward – it is also to ensure everyone in the organization is pulling together toward the same goal: the cloud adoption and transformation of your business and even your industry.

You are new to this, and you are trying to find your way – and trying to avoid the common pitfalls of cloud adoption.

You will most likely read from start to finish, skipping only a few sections (for example, a section on migration if you and your organization have nothing to migrate). We’d love to hear from you!

An architect that has been through the journey of cloud adoption and – there isn’t an easy way of saying this – things haven’t gone to plan. In fact, they have gone terribly wrong, and oh, boy (or girl, or however you want us to address you – hard in a book where we can’t hear your replies), do you have stories to tell. Excellent. If you don’t put yourself out there and try and give it your best, you won’t fail – but you won’t succeed either. So, kudos for your bravery.

You aren’t new to this and as some say, “this isn’t your first rodeo.” You have seen things that have worked and things that have failed. Sometimes you made things better and sometimes you were prevented from making meaningful change, but you must dust yourself off and get back in the saddle, partner.

You will most likely pick the most interesting chapter from the list and start reading there and you will be jumping back and forth muttering agreement or disagreement as you read. Either way, we’d love to hear from you!

A person in an organization that is going through the transformation process. You could be the CFO, a QA engineer, or any other role, all this equally applies to your role – some parts more than others, of course. There may be an architect who is leading the transformation and you either have huge respect for their vast technical cloud knowledge or the opposite – you see them struggling and want to help.

You are interested in learning but need guidance. What are the questions you should be asking? What are the areas you should be focusing on? Who are the people you should be talking to?

You will read this book and go online every once in a while, to learn more about a particular topic. That is to be commended and encouraged.

Either way, your role in this organizational transformation will become a lot clearer after reading this book once, and by the time you go back and read it again to remind yourself of all the great ideas, you should have a chance to implement some of the suggestions. We’d love to hear from you throughout your journey!

If you fit into one of these three personas (heck, even if you do not!), please – we would very much like to hear from you. Tell us how we did, so we can improve. Tell us whether you feel all your questions were answered or you have more questions. Tell us where we fell short and what you would like to learn more about! We’d also love to hear about your own journey, your experiences, your successes, and the troubles you encountered along the way.

Who are we?

Between us… We are a pair of developers or cloud architects, or entrepreneurs, or consultants, or executives, that have had the good fortune to both be in the right place at the right time and have an enormous passion for this field.

They say if you love what you do, you will never work a day in your life (warning: cheesiness).

We’ve worked across industries; across verticals and horizontals; across industries that are emerging and industries that are heavily regulated; across continents, countries, counties, and cities; working from home or from an office, in open offices, and in our own private offices; across technology stacks and across hyperscale cloud providers; and on-premises, we’ve been a part of digital transformations before digital transformations were a thing.

We’ve survived wars, we’ve survived economic downturns, and we’ve survived pandemics. We’ve had experiences we wish we could forget, and we’ve had experiences that have shaped us and will be treasured for the rest of our lives. Sometimes we’ve helped others and almost always we’ve also learned from them. We’ve dealt with providers large and small, spoken at meetups as small as a dozen people, and at conferences in front of hundreds and thousands of people. We’ve been a part of many teams and led many teams.

And now, put your hands together for Darren…

I still remember the first time I witnessed someone programming. One evening, I watched someone copy BASIC commands from a textbook into a small computer – a Sharp PC (pocket computer), though the exact model escapes me. Looking over his shoulder, I was fascinated by this strange language he wrote that could control a machine and give it a whole life of its own. I thought that, with enough commands, in the correct order, we would magically create AI – I was 8 years old, and the scale of such things was beyond me. Still, this led to owning a computer, learning to code, and spending the majority of my time since then in front of a computer screen. But I regret nothing!

I stumbled across AWS sometime around 2008. Initially, I was dismissive of S3 – to me, it was just web hosting, but with better marketing. Then came EC2, but VMs were nothing new. Local web hosts had been offering these for some time, but Amazon could do it at a fraction of the cost. Interesting… But with SQS, things got really interesting. A message queue, the backbone of any enterprise application could be created with a credit card and a few clicks. But would any serious organization trust a bookshop with even a tiny piece of their IT infrastructure?

Well, we all know what happened next. With more and more services from AWS, more players entered the space to copy and compete with Amazon. But few dared to imagine how the cloud would radically alter the IT landscape and I would wager fewer still could have predicted the effect it would have on the culture of IT departments and technology companies globally.

I feel incredibly lucky to not only have witnessed such rapid transformation in technology over the last three decades, but to actually deliver solutions that delight users – all built on the cloud created by the most innovative technology companies that have ever existed.

And once more, put your hands together for Sasa (read as Sasha)…

I taught myself how to code in a basement shelter in third/fourth grade during the Croatian War of Independence, with no electricity, reading four books on GW-Basic. I coded my first game on paper before I ever saw a computer – I had to simulate random numbers by annoying people in the shelter to pick a number (by the way, one of the worse ways of generating randomness).

I started working as a developer and I still am a developer, even though nowadays people sometimes call me an architect.

I’ve worked in public and private sectors, telecoms, financial institutions, health care providers and insurers, defense, law enforcement, secret services, and governments. I’ve used Java and C#, Python and bash, SQL and NoSQL, and Windows and Linux (and Solaris). I was there when AWS started with my favorite service, to which my best friend introduced me – Simple Queue Service (SQS), and I was there when Azure launched my now all-time favorite service – SignalR (if you don’t know anything about it, drop this book now and go learn about it – everything in this book can wait; SignalR is just so useful as a service). I am also a massive fan of Google’s cloud efforts because I feel we cannot have just two providers dominate the market as that will lead to trouble. (We are already beginning to see some of this troublesome behavior.)

I’ve been called on to approve deals worth over $50 million and I’ve helped the digital transformation efforts of global, strategic top-500 customers of Microsoft. I have talked to C-level executives and developers and quality assurance engineers and project and product managers – and I have successfully (sometimes through many iterations) convinced them to follow a course of action that led them to get the full value out of their cloud investments.

And now, to answer the inevitable questions that always come up – AWS versus Azure? Azure wins for me for two reasons: the Azure portal is amazing when compared to the AWS Management Console, and Microsoft account teams (both commercial and technical) will do anything to help you (as will AWS’) – but the sheer commercial and enterprise power of Microsoft is unrivaled if you are looking to partner commercially. AWS has a better support organization, in my humble opinion. And Google – they should be doing a lot better than they are (maybe they could use some help?) in the cloud wars, but you can definitely run your services in any of these three clouds – if you know what you are doing. Do you? Do you know?

The easiest way to contact me is at linkedin.com/in/sasakovacevic/.

Enough of the fancy words, enough of the introductions; it’s time to tell you exactly how this book will help you – today.

What is this book about?

Very specifically, this book will help you with cloud adoption by describing the following exactly:

What you need to know to be able to strategize, plan, govern, manage, and innovate your cloud adoption and your applications and services in the cloud (with examples and focus on Azure while still being applicable to any cloud or any multi-cloud environment).Who will be your friends in a constant struggle to stumble forward with agility and confidence, how to manage relationships and activities with your friends, and how to be the evangelist that sees every interaction and every touchpoint with anyone in the organization and outside of it as an opportunity to include them and bring them along on the cloud adoption journey. Repetition is key! Repetition is key!How to get things done in an iterative and agile way and with one eye (or ear, or finger) on the business needs and the other on the technical requirements.When is the right time to approach each topic, when is the time for compromise, and when is the time for decisive action to achieve the business goals.The anti-patterns – things that may make sense initially but have been tried and proven not to work.

This book (if you are still following what we were discussing) will equip you with the tools to use with this practical guide to define and execute your cloud adoption strategy. But every business organization is different, at different stages of maturity and with different ideas about what success looks like.

You will walk away from this book with knowledge, specific insight, and a practical plan (and a mindset as well) that will help you and everyone in your organization define and execute a cloud adoption strategy.

We will explore a wealth of past experiences that have enabled us to deliver smooth execution of cloud migrations. We also want to highlight areas that are ripe for innovation.

Industry-specific considerations such as compliance and data security will be at the forefront. We won’t focus as much on a specific technology or go in-depth on how to use it but try and set broad standards and focus on technology as it enables organizational transformation.

We will also investigate the organization’s transformation and how to achieve it, who you absolutely must bring along for the ride, who will go willingly, and who you will have to drag kicking and screaming into the cloud.

You will learn how to create a compelling strategy that gets buy-in across the organization, and which approaches work to win over and influence those with the most to lose (and how to have them look at the wins that are available to them).

No plan survives the first contact with an enemy on the battlefield, but forming a realistic plan is a must for you to be able to deliver and govern cloud adoption and the cloud itself over the long term (or at least for the next 2-3 years before you change organizations).

You will also learn how to recognize the right time to, and how to, decommission existing practices, processes, and technology, and replace them with those appropriate for the cloud in 2025, 2030, and beyond (of course, being mindful that long-term plans are just a beacon in the fog of uncertainty).

The plans you will make need to be general, broad, and adaptable in order to be able to survive contact with the enemy (that is, market forces). General plans that cover a broad range of circumstances are better than specific, narrow plans. You will also need to understand which services are not going to last (in our opinion), which services are vaporware, and which technology trends are important for cloud adoption and your industry.

Finally, we will also give you some tips and you will learn all about navigating cloud adoption in heavily regulated industries such as finance, insurance, defense, and so on.

By the way, a convention to be on the lookout for…

Throughout this book, you will come across sections such as this next one, where one of us (the authors) will interject with an opinion or an anecdote, asides, and tangents that will briefly, or at length, describe something you might want to investigate after you have read, understood, and started implementing the wonderful things you’ve learned here in this book – so be on the lookout for them.

Here is an example of an aside – one of the many questions we get a lot.

Multi-cloud? Yes or no. Or, when?

Absolutely never, except if you are an organization with thousands of developers and have products that are not all interconnected; if you are an umbrella organization and have acquired companies that are already using different clouds and have customers in production; or if you are in a regulated market or a government entity with mandates for multi-cloud.

Regardless, if you can choose, do not choose multi-cloud. You must double or triple governance and you limit the growth and cross-pollination of services and developers. Also, it’s a huge pain adopting one cloud. Why adopt more than one if you really don’t have to?

If you must go with multi-cloud, then pick one primary cloud, do well with it (that is, adopt the hell out of it), and only then introduce the second one. Stay away from three. There be dragons.

Simple really.

But, but, but… what about vendor lock-in? That is not a thing, in so far that everything you do locks you in, so stop worrying about a future issue that may never come up, stop focusing on the lowest-common-denominator technology, and embrace – adopt – the cloud. If you must do multi-cloud, adopt one well and then introduce another.

And, again – in the next edition of this book, you could see your anecdotes here as well, so contact us if you have something to share. We’d love to learn from your experiences and share them with future readers.

I once had a client…

I just want to make sure that if you have been through this journey and had issues along the way, you understand that these things happen to the best of us.

Cloud adoption is hard on both the technology and business levels. Sustainable, governable, and painless cloud adoption is a rare exception – one that we want to help you replicate here.

So, I once had this client (one of many), a huge global financial institution that had attempted to adopt the cloud as best as they knew how and had unfortunately failed spectacularly.

They failed so spectacularly that the regulator fined them and made the governance processes so stringent and hard that they had to completely scrap their effort. And they had applications, services, and customers – live in production. But the mess was such that only a hard reset and only a change at a VP level could get them out of this crisis. Whole departments were disbanded and the organization had to undergo a re-org, and then another one just for good measure, to be able to start again.

This time, in a much smarter (and a reasonably cautious) way, with buy-in from every level of the organization. And they are just now, after a year and a half, coming back with those applications, services, and customers – to production.

Some failures you accept and shy away from, and some you embrace and you do better – maybe with some outside help.

This is one of those double, good news/bad news types of situations.

The bad news: they wasted a lot of time, their competitors plowed ahead, and they suffered in the process. The good news: they understood the benefits of the cloud and were still very keen to try again, and they are now doing a lot better having understood that cloud adoption is easy to do poorly and hard to do well – but well worth the effort.

If only there was a book they could have referred to in their time of need, or if only they had good people that read such a book and understood the complexities of a complete digital transformation. If only…

We’ve met you now and, hopefully, you now understand that this book was tailor-made for you.

Are you ready?

Change is hard. Changing an entire organization is even harder. It is made harder still when coupled with such a huge technological paradigm shift as cloud computing, which not only requires knowledge of software, networking, and cloud services but also the knowledge of high-level concepts that cloud computing brings to the forefront.

Let us share a hard truth with you: almost every organization in the world is now adopting the cloud or planning to adopt the cloud – and they are all trying to do it as a matter of course, as a thing you do and complete and get done, as a thing you do as you’ve done before. Doing that is not impossible, but the results from such a strategy are lackluster at best. Take heed and bear witness to the truths that lie herein (to quote the tales of the Horadrim from the computer game Diablo) – nothing short of revolutionary organizational change and acceptance that we are not in Kansas anymore (to quote from the Wizard of Oz) is going to suffice.

You can either accept the need for this or you can try and fight it, do what you’ve always done, and stick with your traditions of IT change management. Hopefully, it is slowly dawning on you how seriously you and your organization must take this process. For nothing is at stake here, other than the very future of your organization.

The cloud architect is the one person in an organization that needs to understand all of this. Must. Understand. All.

They must be able to convey the importance of each topic to others in the organization and will need to work with all levels in the organization to bring about the change.

In cloud computing, the top priority is to achieve the business goals of the organization. All other matters take a back seat. Focus on what really matters. And in this book, we assume that the business goals are broadly aligned to do the following:

Deliver digital services to customers (internal and external).Be quick but diligent about it (agility and compliance).Pay for agility and acceleration but don’t break the bank (focus on agility first, but then circle back to cost optimization regularly).Enforce the brand and the reputation of the organization (security and sustainability).And lastly, have peace of mind and the time to learn new things (less firefighting, more innovation).

Your organization has decided to go all-in on the cloud. So, the buy-in, in principle at least, is there. Now, how does one transform the organization to be able to quickly and efficiently deliver on that promise in its day-to-day operation.

This book will address this challenge by showcasing the actual path to take from day zero (the decision) to strategy formation, planning, and execution, all the way down to day-to-day operation and long-term management. Anything short of total organization and technology transformation will miss all opportunities the cloud provides.

Agility: Business needs must be addressed yesterday, not in six months or two years. How does the adoption of the cloud help address this? What in the organization is preventing innovation, faster time-to-market, cost efficiency, and global scale? Not just one agile team, but repeated over and over again, at all levels and across all teams, in an orderly, organized, governed, and compliant way – without adding more bureaucracy, but rather by empowering all levels of the organization to be agile by default.

True agile adoption requires one to steer the organization not with slight and sporadic nudges but through focused radical course correction. Imagine a massive oil tanker attempting a 180-degree turn: the process is slow and appears to only make small incremental changes, but it is predictable and when it starts there is no stopping it.

This book will address this challenge by providing callouts, funny anecdotes, adoption stories from enterprise and start-up perspectives, information from running a SaaS platform in a regulated industry, ideal and cynical views, examples of what did work and what didn’t, patterns and anti-patterns, and so on.

Agility

I cannot stress this enough, and I’ve had this conversation with many CFOs, product and project managers, and even developers. To quote Donald Knuth, “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” This applies to culture as much as it does to code. Trying to optimize your practices while trying to achieve agility is lunacy – you don’t know yet what is important, or where the bottlenecks will occur.

Focusing on agility means focusing on the easiest path to production. If that means procuring more expensive services either on a higher tier or at a larger scale, do it. You do not want to waste time arguing about the sizes of VMs, App Service plans, or do we use Service Bus or Event Hub. Repeat after me: It doesn’t matter.

Remember that you are trying to develop, deploy, and deliver a digital service to customers. How do you know if it is a success or a failure? You get it out there, into the hands of your customers (again – external or internal), and you gather telemetry and feedback.

Is the service performing its business function and bringing value? Now push on and deliver more. Once you are getting diminished returns on the new features, go back and focus on optimizing the service. You may have paid for a few months of more expensive tiers and services and some of them may not have been optimal, but they were being used and the business is better for it.

The only exception to this is security: you do not compromise on security – ever.

And if the service wasn’t successful, evolve it from telemetry and feedback – or, kill it with fire. Be ruthless. You must. Or the market will be ruthless.

One practical example of this was the delivery of a COVID-19 vaccination registration and scheduling form. We did not compromise on security, but we picked the easiest (fastest, most agile) services to be able to get the form into the hands of the customers as soon as possible.

We ensured elasticity and when 5 million people accessed the form on day 1, it just worked. Then it took us two weeks to move that to more cost-efficient services and evolve the service further (for example, to be able to amend the scheduled slot). We paid for a few weeks more than was necessary, but the service was live and in the hands of those that needed it.

We could have waited a month and done the optimization upfront and then rolled it out, but you can get a lot of people vaccinated in a month.

Another example might be a service for the world’s largest sneakers manufacturer. The decision was between optimizing for agility and deploying a service that would be ready for Black Friday and the Christmas season or optimizing for cost and deploying the service in time for Valentine’s Day.

After stating it in those terms, which path do you think they chose? Which path would you choose?

Practicality: An architect needs to be in control of everything from innovation to workload deployment, scalability, agility, governance, and so on. It is literally impossible for one person to mind all these things, so to scale, an architect needs to influence the rest of the organization to get buy-in initially and continually, and to help create an organization that is then by default ready to address these challenges without the need to micromanage, argue, or struggle to deliver on all levels of the organization.

This book will address this challenge by providing the patterns and mechanisms (and sometimes just pure practical advice) on how to achieve this goal. This is a continuous process that is overwhelming initially and like any new process, it is initially painful as it involves all levels of the organization, but with the proper strategy and planning it can be done at scale.

Understand cloud adoption and digital transformation generally, and what it means in practicality in the day-to-day running of a cloud platform. Learn from actual examples – an enterprise company, a start-up/greenfield site, or a less than successful cloud adoption.

Be able to plan the cloud adoption journey and help all levels of the organization to do so as well. And then execute on that.

Innovate with the business goals in mind, then execute with cloud workloads that are automated and deployed in a predictable and safe manner, in a fast and agile way, without worrying every time someone interacts with the cloud that something will go wrong.

Have an overview of the entirety of your cloud workloads, what they do, why they are there, how they interact with each other, and how to deal with any issue relating to them being there – from communicating internally on required improvements to communicating internally to stakeholders and externally to customers when things inevitably go wrong.