A company’s journey to the cloud typically starts by focusing on migration and modernization. By following the guidance provided by the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure, you can design and implement an effective strategy for your move to Azure. The Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) includes several phases that align to where your team or your company may be in your cloud journey. These phases include:
- Strategy: defining business justification and expected outcomes of adoption.
- Plan: aligning actionable adoption plans to business outcomes.
- Ready: Preparing the cloud environment for the planned changes.
- Migrate: Migrating and modernize existing workloads.
- Innovate: Developing new cloud-native or hybrid solutions.
- Govern: Governing the environment and workloads.
- Manage: Operating management for cloud and hybrid solutions.
- Organize: Governing the environment and workloads.
As part of the Innovate phase, your organization may be able to gain enormous business value by unlocking technical skills and business capabilities. This is accomplished by your ability to deliver to production early and often while decoupling multiple components of your application into microservices. This will allow you to build, measure, and learn in an iterative way while delivering value to your customers through continuous learning.
By implementing Kubernetes and cloud-native practices, your team can respond quickly to your innovation needs. Along the way, it will be important for your team to develop and implement processes and tools such as CI/CD pipelines, logging, monitoring, application metrics, and inner-loop workflows. Your application development teams should prepare to deliver daily or, at most, weekly while aiming for zero-downtime and using Azure Kubernetes Service to enable configuration, governance, security, and much more.
It is important to define the business value that you are going to get by implementing an innovation strategy. It can be very easy to fall into the trap of innovating just for technology’s sake. Once you understand the benefits of a microservice strategy and leveraging technologies at your disposal, you will have the ability to identify existing applications that will benefit from your innovation strategy and allow you to continue your Azure journey.
Your cloud adoption may start with migration and modernization, and as you establish your new operating model and you gain experience with Azure, you will get a lot of value from innovating, and it will be important for you to have a proven path to follow.
At New Signature, we’ve created NS:GO, our Digital Operating Model that allows your business stakeholders, IT operations, and developers to interact with more cohesiveness and unlock maximum value from technology investments. NS:GO is based on the Cloud Adoption Framework, and we will use it to guide you through the complex set of decisions required and into
If you want to discuss more about the adoption framework phases or about NS:GO, our experts are always here to connect with you.
About the Author
Esteban Garcia is New Signature’s Azure and DevOps Senior Vice-President, as well as a Microsoft MVP. Esteban is the found of Nebbia Technologies in Florida, which he then sold to New Signature, substantially adding to our DevOps practice. With more than 20 years of experience building enterprise software, Esteban has a passion for DevOps and Azure. He mentors, trains, and works closely with teams to help them realize their potential by leveraging Azure and DevOps practices to shorten the cycle time from idea to production. Esteban enjoys working with the software community and is a Microsoft Regional Director, Pluralsight author, and hosts Azure Community Live.
