Building a cloud-ready operating model

Because they have extensive hands-on experience with specific cloud environments, such as AWS, Azure and Google, they will understand the subtle nuances within each provider’s services. Adopt agile cloud workflows and non-disruptive automation tools including as many self-service capabilities including provisioning and password resets. VMware is addressing cloud chaos with our portfolio of multi-cloud services, VMware Cross-Cloud services, which enable you to build, run, manage, secure, and access applications consistently across cloud environments. With VMware Cross-Cloud services, you can address cloud chaos and shift to a cloud smart approach – one where you can choose the best environment for every application, without multiplying your complexity. Cloud operations (CloudOps) is the management, delivery and consumption of software in a computing environment where there is limited visibility into an app’s underlying infrastructure.

Think of opportunities to bring the team together to take a break, reconnect, celebrate wins, and have a little fun. The responsibilities of a cloud engineer include coding the architect’s designs, deciding how applications ought to operate and scaling their components, performing maintenance, upgrading existing cloud systems, and developing new ones. The thought leadership, principles, and methodologies introduced in the OCI Cloud Adoption Framework provide a structured approach for developing the operating model. The expected outcome of these workshops is a detailed operations guide, or “operational runbook,” that establishes a repeatable set of the following processes for your IT organization. Applications like Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams are also necessary for teams to communicate quickly and efficiently, especially in a remote-first world. In the past, a developer could walk over to the operations team to ask about the status of an incident.

Application portfolio assessment – a primer to cloud migration

Metrics must be detailed enough to be traced back to a team, tracked quarterly, and attributed to a business outcome so that executives can see where they need more coverage or support. Service-level metrics are traditionally defined by activities or individual team outputs, and funding is based on volume. This creates an incentive to increase the amount of activity, rather than improve performance. Fragmented lines of responsibility create confusion about who should be doing which tasks. It’s not uncommon, for example, to find dozens of IT infrastructure specialists on a production-incident resolution call because no one is certain who owns the task. As a result, customers can experience delays in restoration of infrastructure services or in a product release.

• The job of a CloudOps engineer is to develop the cloud environment using their technical knowledge of multiple programming languages, professional programming experience, as well as analytical skills, and creative thinking.
• On the operations side, SREs oversee incident management, keep track of service-level objectives and indicators, coordinate product releases, and perform such hands-on tasks as monitoring systems and resolving incidents.
• There are hundreds of tools from dozens of vendors that can be used for CloudOps.
• Organizations can start by aligning SRE teams with applications or application clusters.
• DevOps teams are usually made up of people with skills in both development and operations.
• They will be responsible for the recruitment process, starting with identifying or hiring the project manager.
• The skills, knowledge and actions needed to complete each of these project examples vary widely.

Cloud systems analysts are responsible for monitoring the performance of your cloud systems. They work to guarantee that the system stays online devops organization structure so that service to customers is not interrupted. This, of course, is a highly subjective question to which there is no “right” answer.

Development and operations collaboration

The project manager in a cloud team structure serves as the bridge between the project’s stakeholders and the technical team. 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.

Developers that specialize in cloud projects understand specific cloud resources, services, architectures and service-level agreements in order to create scalable and extensive software products. A cloud project may involve multiple software development teams, each focusing on a particular aspect of the project — be it the user interface, network code or back-end integration. CloudOps encompasses cloud platform engineering principles, combining elements of cloud architecture, IT operations, application development, security, and regulatory compliance to enable organizations to manage cloud-based applications and services. CloudOps defines strategies and best practices for cloud-related activities, including monitoring and security, as well as providing guidance on cloud governance processes, such as cost management and compliance. This is similar to how DevOps is a set of practices that codifies the delivery of software development (Dev) combined with IT operations (Ops).

Cloud security specialist

Diagram your cloud architecture to contextualize all those moving parts and visualize how everything fits together, what your current environment looks like, and what areas need attention. Automatically visualize your entire cloud environment with Lucidscale to see key cloud governance data in context. Simply connect your cloud environment through third-party access to generate your full cloud infrastructure organized by cloud, region, compute instance, or other resources. A cloud security specialist sometimes oversees the architected infrastructure and software under development and ensure cloud accounts, resources, services and applications meet security standards.

The team can offer a catalog of existing services and a road map of upcoming services or improvements. The cloud migration project will require a DevOps engineer to oversee the development teams, closing the gap between them and system administrators. This role is responsible for taking care of all tools, processes, pipelines, and methodologies required for deploying the cloud software. DevOps engineers will be configuring and setting up the necessary cloud resources, such as virtual machines, storage, and networking. They also ensure that the migrated infrastructure and applications are configured for optimal performance and scalability.

Build an engineering-focused talent model

There will still be maintenance, compliance audits, optimization, resource deployment, data integration, and more critical tasks to be done on a regular basis. To keep up with everything, you are going to need to institute and standardize processes for continued cloud management from your team. Business leaders are typically the project stakeholders or executive sponsors who manage the budget for a cloud project and anticipate the tangible benefits from the project’s outcome. Additionally, they establish the cloud project’s goals, gather metrics and evaluate success. Find an application to migrate that can provide proof-of-concept for operations and user teams alike and can demonstrate to all stakeholders the viability of a wide-scale cloud migration.

Exacerbating this issue is that workers with specific role profiles often lack experience across legacy and cloud environments. For example, many organizations have database administrators who specialize in a single database, such as Oracle, SQL Server, or PostgreSQL. In fact, we’ve found that many professionals can master full classes of databases, such as relational or non-SQL, across different cloud environments. 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.

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Cloud developers should have an in-depth understanding of service level agreements and a range of cloud provider architectures, such as AWS, GCP, and Azure. One of the low-level concerns this group is responsible for is AMI and base container image maintenance. This might be the AMIs used for Kubernetes nodes and the base images used by application pods running in the cluster.

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. You’ll have lots of architecture astronauts on your hands, and they will need to be able to answer questions around things like high availability and disaster recovery. Even if there isn’t shared infrastructure, it’s valuable to have an opinionated set of technologies to consolidate institutional knowledge, tooling, patterns, and practices. This doesn’t have to act as a hard-and-fast rule, but it means teams should be able to make a good case for operating outside of the guard rails provided. Business leaders can handle project management, but they may not possess the skills and IT background needed to organize and manage the technical aspects of a cloud project.

Development and operations together

Notice that I’ve entirely sidestepped terms like “DevOps” and “SRE” in this discussion. That is intentional as these concepts frequently serve as a distraction for companies who are just beginning their journey to the cloud. There are ideas encapsulated by these philosophies which provide important direction and practices, but it’s imperative to not get too caught up in the dogma.