Exploring options for transformation

In developing and migrating workloads to cloud, there a number of options that architects must consider already from the beginning. In the next 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? Are the effort and thus costs weighing up to the benefits of transformation? It might be better to leave the application as-is, maybe lift-and-shift...

Executing technology mapping and governance

Companies have an ambition and a strategy to fulfil 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, 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 for successful implementation of technology, including 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: for what will be technology be used? Next, it’s assessed against...

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 improving the business. Starting a multi-cloud journey requires a 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. One of the first tasks ahead is to make sure that we keep the platforms consistent, 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 evolves in an extreme high pace. It’s hard to keep up with all new developments and 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.

With...

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 Ingnite and Re:Invent?
4. Rate false or true: a North Star is a detailed enterprise architecture.

Translating business KPIs into cloud SLAs

Frankly, infrastructure in the cloud should be a black box for a business. Infrastructure is like turning on a water tap. Some IT companies referred to operating cloud infrastructure as liquid or fluid IT for that reason: it was simply there, all the time. As a consequence, the focus on SLAs shifted to the business itself. Also, that is part of cloud adoption. As enterprises are moving ahead in the adoption process, a lot of businesses are also adopting a different way of working. If we can have flexible, agile infrastructure in the cloud, we can also speed up the development of environments and applications. Still, also in the cloud, we have to carefully consider service-level objectives and KPIs.

Let’s have a look at the cloud SLA. What are topics that would have to be covered in an SLA? The A stands for agreement and, from a legal perspective, it would be a contract. Therefore, an SLA typically has the format and the contents...

Using cloud adoption frameworks to align between cloud providers

The magic word in multi-cloud is a single pane of glass. What do we mean by that? Imagine that you have a multi-cloud environment that comprises a private cloud running VMware and a public cloud platform in AWS, and you’re also using SaaS solutions from other providers. How would you keep track of everything that happens in all these components? Cloud providers might take care of a lot of things, so you need not worry about, for example, patches and upgrades. In SaaS solutions, the provider really takes care of the full stack, from the physical host all the way up to the operating systems and the software itself. However, there will always be things that you, as a company, will remain responsible for. Think of matters such as IAM and security policies. Who has access to what and when?

This is the new reality of complexity: multi-cloud environments consisting of various solutions and platforms. How can we manage...

Understanding identities and roles in the cloud

Everything in the cloud has an identity. There are two things that we need to do with identities: authenticate and authorize. For authentication, we need an identity store. Most enterprises will use Active Directory (AD) for that, where AD becomes the central place to store the identities of persons and computers. We won’t be drilling down into the technology, but there are a few things you should understand when working with AD. First of all, an AD works with domains. You can deploy resources—VMs or other virtual devices—in a cloud platform, but if that cloud platform is not part of your business domain, it won’t be very useful. So, one of the key things is to get resources in your cloud platform domain-joined. For that, you will have to deploy domain services with domain controllers in your cloud platform or allow cloud resources access to the existing domain services. By doing that, we are extending the...

Creating the service design and governance model

The final thing to do is to combine all the previous sections into a service design and governance model for multi-cloud environments. So, what should the contents be of a service design? Just look at everything we have discussed so far. We need a design that covers all the topics: requirements, identities and access management, governance, costs, and security. Let’s discuss these in detail.

Requirements

This includes the service target that will comprise a number of components. Assuming that we are deploying environments in the public cloud, we should include the public cloud platform as such as a service target. The SLA for Microsoft Online Services describes the SLAs and KPIs committed to by Microsoft for the services delivered on Azure. These are published on https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/. For AWS, the SLA documentation can be found at https://aws.amazon.com/legal/service-level-agreements/....

Summary

In this chapter, we’ve explored the main pillars of cloud adoption frameworks, and we learned that the different frameworks overlap quite a bit. We’ve identified the seven stages of cloud adoption up until the point where we can really start migrating and transforming applications to our cloud platforms. In multi-cloud environments, control and management are challenging. It calls for a single-pane-of-glass approach, but, as we have also learned, there are just a few tools—the one ring to rule them all—that would cater to this single pane of glass.

One of the most important things to understand is that you first have to look at identities in your environment: who, or what, if we talk about other resources on our platform, is allowed to do what, when, and why? That is key in setting out the governance model. The governance model is the foundation of the service design.

In the last section of this chapter, we’ve looked at the different...

Questions

1. You are planning a migration of a business environment to the public cloud. Would an assessment be a crucial step in designing the target environment in that public cloud?
2. You are planning a cloud adoption program for your business. Would you consider cost management as part of the cloud adoption framework?
3. IAM plays an important role in moving to a cloud platform. What is the environment most commonly used as an identity directory in enterprise environments?

Further reading

Alongside the links that we mentioned in this chapter, check out the following books for more information on the topics that we have covered:

• Mastering Identity and Access Management with Microsoft Azure, by Jochen Nickel, published by Packt Publishing
• Enterprise Cloud Security and Governance, by Zeal Vora, published by Packt Publishing