​​AWS Cloud Adoption Framework Part 5: Platform Perspective

Welcome to Part 5 of our series on the Cloud Adoption Framework. In this article,  we delve into the Platform Perspective and the critical aspects of infrastructure and applications. This perspective is all about accelerating the delivery of your cloud workloads through a robust, scalable, and hybrid cloud environment. 
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​The Platform Perspective encompasses seven essential capabilities that are vital for success as shown in the figure below.
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Figure 1: AWS CAF Platform perspective capabilities

Platform Architecture

• Establishing and maintaining guidelines, principles, patterns, and guardrails for your cloud environment is key.
• By creating a well-architected cloud environment, you can expedite implementation, reduce risks, and foster cloud adoption.
• It's important to build consensus within your organization on enterprise standards that drive cloud adoption.
• Define best practice blueprints and guardrails to facilitate authentication, security, networking, and logging and monitoring.
• Additionally, evaluate hybrid cloud use cases such as cloud bursting, backup and disaster recovery, distributed data processing, and edge computing.

Data Architecture
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• Designing a fit-for-purpose data and analytics architecture is crucial for reducing complexity, cost, and technical debt while gaining valuable insights from growing data volumes.
• Adopt a layered and modular architecture that allows you to leverage the most suitable tools for each task and iteratively evolve your architecture to meet emerging requirements.
• Select key technologies for different architectural layers, including ingestion, storage, catalog, processing, and consumption.
• Consider the adoption of serverless technologies to simplify ongoing management and focus on supporting real-time data processing.
• A Lake House architecture can also facilitate seamless data movements between data lakes and purpose-built data stores.

Platform Engineering
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• Building a compliant multi-account cloud environment with enhanced security features and reusable cloud products is vital.
• An effective cloud environment enables your teams to easily provision new accounts while ensuring adherence to organizational policies.
• Curating a set of cloud products allows you to codify best practices, improving governance and expediting the speed and consistency of your cloud deployments.
• Deploy best practice blueprints, detective and preventative guardrails, and integrate your cloud environment with your existing ecosystem to enable desired hybrid cloud use cases.
• Automate the account provisioning workflow, leverage multiple accounts for security and governance goals, and establish connectivity between on-premises and cloud environments, as well as between different cloud accounts.
• Implement federation between your existing identity provider (IdP) and your cloud environment to enable users to authenticate using their existing login credentials.
• Centralize logging, conduct cross-account security audits, create inbound and outbound
• Domain Name System (DNS) resolvers, and gain dashboard visibility into your accounts and guardrails.
• Evaluate and certify cloud services in alignment with corporate standards and configuration management, packaging and continuously improving enterprise standards as self-service deployable products and consumable services.
• Leverage infrastructure as code (IaC) to define configurations in a declarative manner.

Data Engineering
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• Automating and orchestrating data flows across your organization can significantly enhance productivity and time to market.
• Form cross-functional data engineering teams comprising infrastructure and operations, software engineering, and data management.
• Leverage metadata to automate pipelines that process raw data and produce optimized results.
• Implement relevant architectural guardrails, security controls, monitoring, logging, and alerting mechanisms to handle pipeline failures.
• Identify common data integration patterns and develop reusable blueprints that abstract away the complexities of pipeline development.
• Share these blueprints with business analysts and data scientists, empowering them to operate using self-service methods.

Provisioning and Orchestration

• As your organization grows, maintaining consistent and scalable infrastructure provisioning becomes more complex.
• Streamlined provisioning and orchestration are crucial to achieving governance consistency and meeting compliance requirements.
• Simultaneously, these practices enable users to quickly deploy approved cloud products.
• Design and implement a centrally-managed, self-service portal for publishing, distributing, browsing, and consuming approved cloud products.
• Make your cloud products accessible through APIs and personalized portals.
• Integration with IT service management (ITSM) tools and automation of configuration management database (CMDB) updates can further streamline the process.

Modern Application Development

• Building well-architected, cloud-native applications is key to unlocking speed and agility in innovation.
• Leveraging containers and serverless technologies helps optimize resource utilization and enables automatic scaling to meet varying demands.
• Consider decoupling applications into independent microservices using event-driven architectures.
• Implement security measures across all layers and throughout the application development lifecycle.
• Automate the scaling process or utilize serverless technologies.
• Modernize existing applications to reduce costs, increase efficiencies, and leverage existing investments.
• Replatforming and refactoring legacy applications to a cloud-native architecture are effective strategies.
• Ensure that your architecture considers service quotas and physical resources to avoid negative impacts on workload performance and reliability.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
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• To drive faster innovation, improved agility, and better business outcomes, organizations must adopt DevOps practices with continuous integration, testing, and deployment.
• Implementing CI/CD pipelines allows for continuous evolution and improvement of applications and services.
• Start with a minimum viable pipeline for continuous integration and gradually transition to a more comprehensive continuous delivery pipeline.
• Encourage developers to create unit tests early in the development process and run them before pushing the code to the central repository.
• Include staging and production steps in your continuous delivery pipeline, and consider incorporating manual approvals for production deployments.
• Explore various deployment strategies, such as in-place, rolling, immutable, and blue/green deployments.

Summary

The Platform Perspective is a crucial framework for accelerating the delivery of cloud workloads and achieving success in your cloud initiatives. By establishing guidelines, principles, and guardrails for your cloud environment, you can create a well-architected foundation that accelerates implementation, reduces risk, and drives cloud adoption.

With the Platform Perspective as your guide, you can navigate the complexities of infrastructure and applications, harnessing the power of an enterprise-grade, scalable, and hybrid cloud environment. By embracing these capabilities, you will be well-equipped to meet the demands of today's dynamic business landscape and drive successful outcomes in your cloud initiatives.

​In Part 6, we will explore the crucial elements and best practices for securing your cloud workloads, protecting your data, and mitigating risks. From identity and access management to network security, data protection, and compliance, the Security Perspective plays a pivotal role in ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your cloud environment.​