Preparing for Cloud Adoption

We discussed the challenges of on-premises architectures in the last chapter, but it turns out that for the majority of businesses, moving to the cloud can be greatly beneficial. However, organizations that do not have experience with the cloud can struggle with finding their way as they lack the required skill sets in their teams.

Apart from you helping them out after finishing this book, there are a few other resources these businesses can leverage to ease their journey to the cloud. For this, Microsoft has two frameworks in place:

• Azure's Well-Architected Framework (WAF)
• The Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)

This chapter provides an overview of the WAF, curated for the cloud data architect. We will look at the pillars on which the framework is built and which parts are most relevant to a data architect.

Next, we will explore the concept of landing zones – more specifically, the data management landing zone and the accompanying...

The Azure WAF

The Azure WAF is a framework created by Microsoft for architects, as a result of being a global leader in cloud architecting for years. The framework is designed to guarantee highly qualitative cloud architectures in accordance with proven best practices.

WAF does not only cover data and analytics but can also be used for any workload in the cloud, such as website hosting or application development. However, many of its core principles trickle down into data architectures as well.

The framework is extensively documented, yet the goal of this chapter is to provide you with the core principles and learnings in a bite-sized format and curate the content that is most relevant to the role of a data architect.

The Azure WAF is built upon the following five pillars:

• Reliability
• Security
• Cost optimization
• Operational excellence
• Performance efficiency

We will take a look at each pillar and how it translates into the responsibilities of a...

Data landing zones

Moving to the cloud can be a daunting task for a business. The Azure Cloud allows the provisioning of hundreds of unique services. Without the knowledge of an experienced architect, starting cloud-based projects can quickly become overwhelming. This counts for both greenfield and brownfield development.

Note

Greenfield development refers to projects built up from scratch, whereas brownfield development uses existing components of a solution to upgrade or revamp a solution.

To lower the barrier of businesses moving their data and infrastructure to the cloud, Azure provides landing zones, as part of the Microsoft CAF. A landing zone is a pre-composed set of services and configurations allowing for simple and fast migration. The architecture of these landing zones is the result of Microsoft’s experience with assisting in thousands of cloud migrations, making them a proven and robust approach. Landing zones can be leveraged in two ways, either starting...

Summary

In this chapter, we zoomed in on two Microsoft frameworks, the WAF and part of the CAF.

We discussed the five pillars of the WAF. Although this framework is designed for all workloads, we curated the relevant principles for data and AI workloads. We explored design principles to optimize reliability, build airtight security, architect for cost-effectiveness, maximize operational excellence, and boost the performance efficiency of an Azure data solution.

Next, the concept of landing zones was introduced, as part of the CAF. After an introduction to some fundamental Azure concepts, such as subscriptions and resource groups, we examined both the data management landing zone and the data landing zone. Leveraging these landing zones is a great way to get started quickly with any data solution at scale on the Azure cloud.

In the next chapter, we will focus on data ingestion into the cloud.