Building a cloud-ready operating model

This is mostly an exercise to identify key organizational needs and concerns. Many organizations struggle to manage their vast collection of AWS accounts, but Control Tower can help. Linux admins can use Cockpit to view Linux logs, monitor server performance and manage users. By the way, freelance platforms such as Upwork, Toptal, Arc, Fiverr, and the likes are great places to hire professionals for this type of project. In most cases, it is better to hire a company that has vetted professionals with on-demand access to them.

Overcoming this problem requires business and IT to take a step back and think holistically about their cloud operating model. IT has become integral to driving value and a crucial enabler in meeting business and customer expectations of speed, flexibility, cost, and reliability. A cloud engineer is an IT and engineering professional who is expected to have a wide variety of technical skills and knowledge. Cloud engineers are responsible for deploying and maintaining many components of the cloud infrastructure including network design, resource allocation, storage, and cloud security. There are usually multiple cloud engineers that will focus on specific areas of the cloud system.

Cloud migrations can be complex and involve many moving parts, and having experienced professionals on hand to guide you through the process can be invaluable. Cloud architects, who are responsible for designing and implementing cloud computing solutions, need to have a thorough understanding of software architecture and architecture patterns for a number of reasons. Another common path is to implement what’s described in “Before you begin,” then to staff a Kitchen Sink SRE team, but swap the order of Infrastructure with product/application when it is time to start a second SRE team.

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While a project manager isn’t necessarily a required team member, they can simplify and organize an otherwise complex series of tasks and projects. Hiring a person to keep track of what work is required and by when gives your cloud team members the bandwidth to focus on maintaining a healthy cloud environment. Maintaining security plays a role in preventing data breaches, as well as reducing downtime and outages. Cloud security managers should work with compliance specialists to proactively design architectures with compliance standards in mind, making security recommendations during architecture reviews or during post-mortems.

A common approach to addressing this challenge is to offer tiers of SRE engagement. Doing so expands the binary approach of “not in scope for us or not yet seen by SRE” and “fully supported by SRE” by adding at least one more tier in between those two options. Provides a clear focus for the team’s effort and allows a clear link from business priorities to where team effort is spent. This is usually contained by establishing a team charter that’s been approved by your business leaders. There is usually a lack of an SRE team charter, or the charter states everything in the company as being possibly in scope, running the risk of overloading the team. Get a comprehensive view of the DevOps industry, providing actionable guidance for organizations of all sizes.

Visualize your entire cloud architecture

Cloud architects often help to design applications so apps function effectively in the cloud. They can also be involved with the creation of an efficient, reliable cloud infrastructure that enables applications to achieve high availability. The emphasis on design requires architects to understand cloud technologies in detail and remain current with cloud developments. ProCoders, which is based in Ukraine, is an IT company that helps businesses assemble teams involved in migration to the virtual computing world to execute their IT needs. It is an important secret that can help you lower your spending and execute on a budget. If your business is set up in North America or anywhere in most of Europe, you are probably the hardest hit with cloud migration professionals salaries.

In this scenario, the result is two specialized product/application SRE teams. This makes sense when there is enough product/application breadth but little to no shared infrastructure between both teams, other than hosted solutions such as the ones provided by Google Cloud. The scope of standards and practices may vary, but usually covers how and when it’s acceptable to change production systems, incident management, error budgets, etc.

In general, cloud operations teams may consist of a project manager, cloud architect, CloudOps and DevOps engineers, a governance and security manager, and a CloudOps leader. Depending on the company culture, words like “standards” and “opinionated” might be considered taboo. These can be especially unsettling for developers who have worked in rigid or siloed environments. These opinions are more meant to serve as a beaten path which makes it easier and faster for teams to deliver products and focus on business value. The key is in understanding how to balance this with flexibility so as to not overly constrain developers.

Setting the standards for configuring and securing cloud resources may demand greater participation from security-minded cloud engineers, along with business leaders with detailed compliance insights. The trick is to match the skills and mindsets of cloud team members with the specific needs of the project. But no matter how good they are, public-cloud providers won’t be able to displace the essential role that internal-infrastructure teams play. From achieving superior TCO in some instances to satisfying very specific use-case needs, internal-infrastructure teams are in a position to add unique value and maintain their critical role in a multicloud environment. To do so, however, they’ll need to improve demand and capacity planning, rationalize configurations, embrace digital service operations, and take a more strategic approach to sourcing.

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Hiring a cloud migration team helps you to mitigate and even eliminate costly mistakes that might be committed by an inexperienced in-house team or unreliable freelancers. Such mistakes include deployment errors, cybersecurity attacks, and compliance issues that may derail your business and cause loss. If internal-infrastructure teams can manage that, then they will be able to deliver the world-class cost, service, and performance so many of their customers inside and outside their organizations increasingly expect. Creating a dedicated sales and operations council can help infrastructure leaders embed forecasting and budgeting discipline into their planning efforts—improving resource utilization and business value. Optimizing data-center footprints and utilization rates takes strong sales- and operations-planning (S&OP) processes. Internal-infrastructure teams need to be able to translate the business’s growth projections into a detailed resource forecast for each region.

• However, what’s moved to the cloud still must be managed, and the work around maintaining cloud-based applications and data stays relatively the same as managing them on site.
• To get the right engineering talent on board, the bank first looked internally and found that 80 percent of its engineers could be reskilled and moved into different or new roles.
• They can also be involved with the creation of an efficient, reliable cloud infrastructure that enables applications to achieve high availability.
• This process helps prevent infrastructure teams from developing solutions that no one needs.
• There are literally hundreds of tools from dozens of vendors that can be used for CloudOps.

In addition, infrastructure teams should consider whether it makes sense for them to move to an original-design-manufacturing model, in which the team designs the machines and procures parts in house and then outsources the build. That shift requires scale and solid in-house design, as well as supply-chain and maintenance capabilities, but it can give teams more control over their sourcing and inventory. In addition, it can allow them to cut out the high-end features and components they don’t need, unlocking potential savings of 20 to 40 percent of total equipment costs. Finally, infrastructure teams should take a similarly strategic approach to their sourcing arrangements with hyperscalers (see sidebar, “‘Hyperscaler’ optimization”). Despite the growing interest, however, a good number of workloads will not be moving to the public cloud anytime soon.

Cloud Migration Team Structure. Roles and Responsibilities of A-Level Members

Depending on the scope of the infrastructure, issues involving such a team may negatively impact your entire business, similar to a Kitchen Sink implementation. SRE tends to act as a glue between disparate dev teams, creating solutions out of distinct pieces of software. Time management between day-to-day job demands vs. adoption of SRE practices.

This signoff is related to, but not the same, as documenting your team charter . An SRE team may also act as a “reliability standards and practices” group for an entire company. A common risk for consulting SRE teams is being perceived as hands-off (i.e., little incurred risk), given that they typically don’t change code and configuration, even though they are capable of having indirect technical impact. Consulting SRE teams may write code and configuration in order to build and maintain tools for themselves or for their developer counterparts. If they are performing the latter, one could argue that they are acting as a hybrid of consulting and tools implementations.

Set Up Your Organization for Cloud Adoption Success

A large Asian bank faced competition from other digital banks and fintechs powered by agile cloud-based platforms. The bank knew it needed to migrate to a cloud-ready infrastructure so that it could quickly develop and test new products, such as a mobile-payment system. However, legacy IT infrastructure; devops organization structure siloed teams across network, database, and storage computing functions; and manual ticket-based workflows made it nearly impossible to modernize its I&O for cloud. Automatically visualize your entire cloud environment with Lucidscale to see key cloud governance data in context.

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Ironically, both models can be used as an argument for “DevOps.” There are also cases to be made for either. The developer argument is better delivery velocity and innovation at a team level. The operations argument is better stability, risk management, and cost control.

No matter what cloud stage you’re in, managing the cloud is a meticulous process. Your team must be able to manage and support the cloud before, during, and after migrations. You’ll need a variety of roles and skills to build and maintain a successful cloud environment. Developer Productivity is tasked with getting ideas from an engineer’s brain to a deployable artifact as efficiently as possible.

With customer expectations and technology evolving at an unprecedented clip, moving to cloud is increasingly becoming a strategic priority for businesses. Capturing the $1 trillion value up for grabs in the cloud, however, has proven frustratingly difficult for many companies. One of the main reasons for this difficulty is that IT’s operating model remains stuck in a quagmire of legacy processes, methodologies, and technologies. The most popular online Visio alternative, Lucidchart is utilized in over 180 countries by millions of users, from sales managers mapping out target organizations to IT directors visualizing their network infrastructure. Lucidchart is the intelligent diagramming application that empowers teams to clarify complexity, align their insights, and build the future—faster.

While these sorts of metrics have their place, hybrid-ready infrastructure teams need to be measured against business outcomes, such as customer adoption. In some organizations, the Infrastructure Engineering team may own and operate infrastructure services, such as common compute clusters, databases, or message queues. In others, they might simply provide opinionated guard rails around these things. Without this, it’s easy to end up with every team running their own unique messaging system, database, cache, or other piece of infrastructure.

Assemble your team

Cloud operations teams should meet to discuss progress and potential challenges on a regular basis. Aligning the cloud team in this way will get everyone on the same page and working together to achieve the cloud migration project’s goals, which is particularly crucial when dealing with changes and introducing new technologies. Managing cloud operations efficiently and ultimately achieving cloud success can be made easier by following an agile project management methodology. This will allow cloud teams to focus on the most important tasks, be more organized with cloud operations projects, and have greater visibility into the project’s progress.