How to Build A Successful Cloud Operations and Governance Practice CloudHealth by VMware Suite

External cloud migration consultants can bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to the table and can help you navigate the various challenges and considerations that come with moving to the cloud. Moreover, when needed, they can also help you with recruitment to help you fulfill all the necessary roles not only for the cloud migration but the future cloud management and maintenance tasks. The cloud operations team structure can vary from one company to another, with different roles and responsibilities allocated based on their cloud migration project needs. When building a cloud operations team, consider the individual skills of each member, as well as the collective experience and knowledge needed to pull off a cloud migration project successfully. As IT migrates to the new operating model, SREs may focus 70 percent or more of their time on operations.

The person you choose for this role should understand cloud technologies and be able to stay current with technology innovations and trends. Moreover, for many companies, the organization model I walked through devops organization structure above was the result of evolving and adapting as needs changed and less of a wholesale reorg. In the spirit of product mindset, we encourage starting small and iterating as opposed to boiling the ocean.

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. Therefore, many businesses willing to migrate have been looking towards outsourcing the projects to third-party teams to manage the process. Outsourcing helps businesses to optimize financial costs not only on hiring but also on cloud infrastructure.

So, what if you could outsource the project to professionals living in another country where the salaries are lower, thereby saving your company money? A good team consists of knowledgeable people with several years of experience in various areas of IT. You’ll find out what cross-skills and experience can make cloud developers great contributors to your future success.

Build a Cloud Migration Team with ProCoders

This is done to ensure an application doesn’t end up using cloud resources when there is no return on investment . As cloud usage grows and more users want to access and deploy their own cloud services, most organizations are adopting a strategy of centralized governance and decentralized execution. Those roles will vary depending on the cloud migration project and the cloud provider used. As the company and system complexity grows, you may be required to split the infrastructure teams, so the cons related to product/application teams apply . They will often define production standards as code and work to smooth out any sharp edges to greatly simplify things for the product developers running their own services.

Cloud engineers ensure that architects have properly designed the servers, and architects are the systems designers. Maybe your organization has decided to move to the cloud and now you need to put together a team to make that happen. Or maybe you’re finally getting serious about minimizing cost and improving performance. Or perhaps you’re rapidly scaling and need more resources to maintain your progress. While serious problems or disruptions are typically directed to engineers and architects, systems and performance analysts gather metrics and work to ensure workload capacity and performance remain within acceptable parameters.

Cloud engineer

They may watch help desk tickets and categorize incidents to recommend additional updates or improvements. Every enterprise is different, so the role of the executive sponsor will vary, but it’s essential that there’s some senior-level commitment to the plan of the project. The sponsorship should be strategic and not necessarily tactical, as this will ensure that the entire organization works together and stays on track. Ultimately, this gives your business new opportunities to scale its operations in an efficient manner. It is the way to increase IT efficiency, improve IT cost optimization, and improve performance. To be successful, you need to build a team that will be responsible for the process.

On-demand service allows a cloud user to pay per use, an option that provides the most flexibility, although at a higher price point. We highly recommend evaluating both “Reliability standards and practices” and “Tiers of service” as early in the SRE process as possible, but that may be feasible only after you’ve established your first SRE team. The implementation details of the tiers vary based on the actual SRE implementation itself. For example, consulting and embedded SRE teams aren’t generally expected to onboard services at Tier 2, but may offer dedicated staffing in Tier 1. We recommend defining tiers of service in a document that’s been approved by SRE and developer leadership.

Common SRE paths

At the same time, the migration is a one-time activity, but ongoing support is required. As such, it is more financially prudent to outsource it to a cloud migration team. It’s important to understand that not every team shares the same goals, or will use the same practices and tools. Different teams require different structures, depending on the greater context of the company and its appetite for change. Without a clear understanding of DevOps and how to properly implement it, a DevOps transformation is usually constrained to reorganizations or the latest tools. Properly embracing DevOps entails a cultural change where teams have new structures, new management principles, and adopt certain technology tools.

Working in a multicloud environment, for instance, will require infrastructure teams to have the necessary design and engineering talent in house. To enable world-class cloud operations, IT-infrastructure teams will need architects to help the business units redesign workloads for the public-cloud capabilities. They’ll also need data scientists and operations-research practitioners to help with capacity planning. In addition, teams must have sufficient depth in operational areas such as supply-market analysis, cleansheet-based negotiations, activity-based resource modeling, demand planning, and contract management.

Visualize your entire cloud architecture

System log – the information that the User’s computer transmits to the server which may contain various data (e.g. the user’s IP number), allowing to determine the approximate location where the connection came from. User – a person that uses the Website, i.e. a natural person with full legal capacity, a legal person, or an organizational unit which is not a legal person to which specific provisions grant legal capacity. The Website is secured by the SSL protocol, which provides secure data transmission on the Internet. I agree to the information on data processing, privacy policy and newsletter rules described here. If you are just starting your SRE practice, we recommend reading Do you have an SRE team yet?

• They should work with SRE teams to understand the challenges in consuming these services.
• Rather countries like Ukraine, India, Mexico, China, etc. have a lower cost of living, which in turn reduces the cost of hiring professionals.
• So you have decided to join the great digital shift and migrate your data to cloud systems, congratulations!
• 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.
• In the spirit of product mindset, we encourage starting small and iterating as opposed to boiling the ocean.
• Attracting the same talent that hyperscalers are hiring will force IT-infrastructure teams to think and plan differently.

This is important if you must make quick changes or accelerate the deployment timeline. By optimizing these resources, your business can focus on innovations, excellence of customer experience and business goals to win a market competition. Atlassian’s Open DevOps provides everything teams need to develop and operate software.

Building an Effective Cloud Operations Team for Your Cloud Migration Project

While the cloud delivers an astonishing array of resources, it requires skill to perfect. By implementing these processes before the migration starts, you will prevent many of the pitfalls that can occur during the process such as underestimating timelines, which may lead to poor execution. More so, not only must you migrate all of your data, but there are also a lot of other things you need to consider after migration. Is it to gain better visibility, to gain better scalability, to reduce costs, or all of the above? How you answer these questions would help you to determine what business value your migration will bring and how successful the process would be.

These attributes have put the relative weaknesses of internal-infrastructure operations on sharp display. Product teams and external customers aren’t able to see the true cost of what they’re paying. Capacity is fixed, and the ordering cycle is so long that product teams often have to predict needs for one or more quarters in the future, increasing the risk of errors. Typically, automated processes include provisioning, user management, security management and API management. Artificial intelligence and machine learning play important roles in automating tasks. That requires the creation and enforcement of policies that limit what users and applications can do in the public cloud.

The SRE model delivers rapid benefits because it brings infrastructure expertise closer to the applications and allows for direct, face-to-face collaboration across application development and infrastructure. That is a substantial shift for most organizations, in which infrastructure resources are pooled so that functional specialists serve the entire application portfolio. To get organizational buy-in you need to clearly articulate what cloud management means.

Reporting – The CloudHealth Basics

At Google, Site Reliability Engineering is our practice of continually defining reliability goals, measuring those goals, and working to improve our services as needed. You can think of that guidance as what SRE teams generally do, paired with when the teams tend to perform these tasks given their maturity level. We believe that many companies can start and grow a new SRE team by following that guidance.

As this staggered approach increasingly blurs the lines between application development and infrastructure, organizations can more nearly approach the operating model of “hyperscalers” . While most organizations will need to adopt a hybrid-cloud approach for the foreseeable future, it will be hard to capture much of cloud’s value without reimagining the IT infrastructure that is ground zero of the cloud operating model. Set up correctly, infrastructure can quickly expand access to new services and products, accelerate time to market for application teams, and cut operating costs at the same time—all of which unleash businesses’ innovation potential. This may require cloud-savvy software developers, as well as cloud architects or engineers to assemble the appropriate infrastructure for that application.

Design infrastructure services as products

This can even take the form of “you build it, you run it”, with the same individuals developing and operating applications. Not only do they have deeper knowledge of the company and its customers but they can also deliver superior TCO in a number of use cases. Many have paid down the cost of their assets, in full or in part, and they own proprietary customer data. They also have the ability to tailor software and hardware solutions to customer needs.