Summary

In this chapter, we explored methodologies that are used to analyze enterprise or business strategies and mapped these to a cloud technology roadmap. We also learned that it is close to impossible to keep track of all the new releases and features that are launched by cloud and technology providers. We need to determine what our business goals and objectives are and define a clear architecture that is as future-proof as possible, yet agile enough to adopt new features if the business demands this.

Business agility must be the focus of the modern, digital enterprise. Business drivers are derived from financial, customer, product and internal objectives, but these are rapidly changing in the current markets. One of the major trends is the upcoming of the subscription-based economy that forces business to create agile organizations and systems that are able to respond to these changes quickly.

Enterprise architectures using frameworks such as IT4IT help us in designing and managing...

Questions

1. How would you define business agility?
2. What would be the first thing to define if we created a business roadmap?
3. In this chapter, we discussed cloud transformation strategies. Rehost and replatform are two of them. Name two more.
4. In this chapter, we identified major developments in the cloud market. What is recognized as being the main change in business models that can be facilitated by using cloud-native technology?

Further reading

• How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy, by Michael E. Porter, Harvard Business Review

Executing technology mapping and governance

Companies have an ambition and a strategy to fulfill that ambition. In the modern, digital company, technology will undoubtedly play an important role in fulfilling that ambition. But, as with every other aspect within the governance of a company, the deployment and management of technology needs proper planning. First, technology must be assessed against the goals a company wants to achieve. In other words: technology must add value to the business goals. Second, a company must be ready to adopt new technology. This means that it must have trained, skilled staff that is able to work with it. With that, we have identified the two main blockers to the successful implementation of technology, including the cloud:

• It might not add value to the business
• There are no human resources available who can work with it

Technology mapping can help here. It typically starts with defining the use cases: what will the technology...

Planning transition and transformation

It must be clear that the planning of the transition and transformation to the cloud starts with the business case. Architects are advised to follow the business-data-application-technology rule to design the roadmap for applications that are designated to be moved to cloud platforms. But before companies can really start migrations, there’s a lot of work that must be done.

Assuming that, from the assessment, we have a clear overview of the current mode of operations, the CMO. From the business case, the company also has set the ambition, goals, and strategy to transform the business to the future mode of operations (FMO)—and the rationale as to why it’s necessary or desirable to transform. As said, this goes beyond technology. The transition and transformation plans should include at least the following topics on the various tiers as shown in the diagram:

Figure 3.3: Simplified enterprise governance model

...

Exploring options for transformation

In developing and migrating workloads to the cloud, there are a number of options that architects must consider from the beginning. In this section, we will elaborate on these choices.

From monolith to microservices

A lot of companies will have technical debt, including monolithic applications. These are applications where services are tightly coupled and deployed as one environment. It’s extremely hard to update or upgrade these applications; updating a service means that the whole application must be updated. Monolithic applications are not very scalable and agile. Microservices might be a solution, wherein services are loosely coupled.

Transforming a monolithic application to microservices is a very cumbersome process. First of all, the question that must be answered is: is it worthwhile? Does the effort and thus costs weigh up to the benefits of transformation? It might be better to leave the application as-is, maybe lift...

Summary

The goal of this chapter was to provide some common understanding of different cloud concepts and how companies could use these to get the best-of-breed solutions to improve the business. Starting a multi-cloud journey requires proper preparation to get the best out of cloud technology, including emerging technologies such as micro-services, containers, and serverless. We noticed that it can become very complex. We must make sure that we keep the platforms consistent, by decreasing complexity and enabling effective management of workloads. Next, we started our journey by creating a plan for transition and transformation, starting with connectivity, and defining landing zones.

Cloud technology evolves at an extremely high pace. It’s hard to keep up with all the new developments and the release of new features. In the last section, we learned how to stay in control with technology mapping, using the principles of the North Star architecture and technology roadmaps...

Questions

1. What is a CMP?
2. This chapter discussed various Kubernetes deployments in public clouds. Name the managed Kubernetes services of Azure, AWS, and GCP.
3. What are Ignite and Re:Invent?
4. True or false: A North Star is a detailed enterprise architecture.

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