This course is a "live" scenario discussion where the Cloud Academy team tackle a migration project. Our customer needs to migrate out of their current data center by a certain date. They also would like to modernize their business applications.
Our brief in the exercise is to deliver:
- A target architecture that addresses the challenges described by the customer
- A migration plan detailing how to move the service to AWS with minimal interruption
- A recommendation on how to approach DR to achieve RPO of 24 hours and RTO of 4 hours
- An application optimization plan with a proposed enhancement roadmap
As a scenario, this series of lectures is recorded "live" and so is less structured than other Cloud Academy courses. As a cloud professional you often have to think and design quickly, so we have recorded some of the content this way to best emulate the type of conditions you might experience in the working environment. Watching the team approach this brief can help you define your own approaches and style to problem-solving.
Intended audience
This course discusses AWS services so it is best suited to students with some prior knowledge of AWS services.
Prerequisites
We recommend completing the Fundamentals of AWS learning path before beginning this course.
If you have thoughts or suggestions for this course, please contact Cloud Academy at support@cloudacademy.com.
Updates
22-01-2020: Duplicate lecture removed
- Okay, so let's just talk through how we might approach this project and I'm thinking let's use the cloud adoption framework as a way of starting this off.
- [Narrator] "The CAF?" I hear you ask? Just what is a CAF? Well, the CAF or the C-A-F stands for the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework and it provides a structure to help you identify and address gaps in skills and processes when running a cloud migration project. It's a great tool used to help your customers understand how cloud adoption can transform the way that they work. And we are using it here as a starting point for the Expertise Please migration project. Applying the cloud adoption framework to a project helps you define an actionable plan with defined work streams that can guide your path to cloud adoption. By identifying the gaps in skills and processes between the current IT environment and the future cloud environment, a customer can create an action plan designed to close these gaps. Now, the cloud adoption framework perspectives, capabilities, skills, and processes are designed for organizations to use as they develop plans and work streams to move from their current IT environment to a cloud environment. Now, every cloud adoption journey is unique. To successfully execute your adoption project, you need to understand the current state, the target state, and the transition required for your customer to achieve the target state. Now, knowing this will help you set goals and create work streams that will enable staff to get started and succeed with the cloud. Engaging stakeholders with the relevant cloud adoption framework perspectives helps inform your journey to cloud adoption. Now, through the discovery phase, you can explore capability gaps in terms of the cloud adoption framework skills and processes. You can define necessary work streams and identify interdependencies between those work streams. Knowing work stream dependencies enables you to optimize collaboration on the AWS platform. Now, the cloud adoption framework provides the structure to discover what organizational skills you need to update and how to modify existing processes and introduce new ones. So, work streams are intuitive and change overtime of course. In some technology areas, you may find it is best for work streams to be integrated with one another. I mean, consider dev ops for example. Dev ops refers to practices, skills, and processes that depend on the collaboration of both development and operational teams. By collaborating across teams, you can automate the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes which makes your organization more agile and efficient. With the cloud adoption framework, you're able to identify how technology development and operations teams can become more closely integrated. And by doing so, how they can optimize business results in their new cloud environment. In that transition to the cloud, stakeholders within each cloud adoption framework perspective need to engage and actively own organizational and operational change for their area. Now, that's always a major challenge and the sooner you can get into and on top of that one the better. And as you implement work streams, the organization can leverage the different cloud adoption framework perspectives to understand how to communicate these interdependencies between different stakeholders. So, let's just quickly review the cloud adoption framework perspectives as these provide a really good blueprint for kicking off a migration project plan. So, first off, we have the business perspective and this helps stakeholders understand the staff skills and organizational processes they will need to optimize to get the most business value as they move their operations to the cloud. So, this perspective is relevant to business managers, the finance manager, budget owners, and strategy stakeholders. And the cloud adoption framework is a really good way of ensuring this project gets the visibility they need from day one. Next, we have the people perspective. This provides guidance for stakeholders responsible for people development, training and communications. So, it's relevant to the human resources, staffing and people managers. Now, this perspective helps stakeholders understand what they need to do to optimize and maintain their workforce. Now, more importantly, it helps ensure competencies are in place at the appropriate time. Now, this is often an overlooked aspect of the migration project. The CEO may want to see rapid results but to achieve that, they are going to need to ensure the teams doing the work have the skills and knowledge to hit the ground running. Next up, we have the governance perspective which provides guidance for stakeholders responsible for supporting business process with technology. Now, this perspective helps stakeholders understand how to ensure the business governance in the cloud is done correctly and to manage and to measure cloud investments so they can evaluate their business outcomes. So, it's relevant to the CIO, the program managers, project managers, enterprise architects, and product managers. The platform perspective helps stakeholders understand how to deliver optimized cloud solutions and services. So, it's relevant to the CTO, IT managers, and solution architects. The security perspective helps stakeholders understand how to ensure that the architecture deployed in the cloud aligns to the organization's security control requirements. So, this is an important perspective and is relevant to the CIO, the IT security manager, and the IT security analysts. Last but by no means least, we have the operations perspective and this helps stakeholders understand how to ensure system health and reliability during the move of operations to the cloud and then to operate using cloud computing-based practices. So, this is relevant to IT operations managers and to IT support managers. So, let's get back to using these perspectives to define a target state and a reference architecture for expertiseplease.com. From there, we can begin to define our target stages, our dependencies, and our work streams. And most importantly, we can keep all of our stakeholders engaged from day one.
Andrew is fanatical about helping business teams gain the maximum ROI possible from adopting, using, and optimizing Public Cloud Services. Having built 70+ Cloud Academy courses, Andrew has helped over 50,000 students master cloud computing by sharing the skills and experiences he gained during 20+ years leading digital teams in code and consulting. Before joining Cloud Academy, Andrew worked for AWS and for AWS technology partners Ooyala and Adobe.