Transcription
Hi, I'm Chris Muchler, principal Enterprise Architect and VCDX 257 from Virtual Elephant. And in this video, we are going to dive deep into the cloud operating model to help you understand how it can be leveraged as you work on your Cloud transformation initiatives. Let's get started.
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In the previous video, I covered the cloud operating model from a very high level and its ability to assist us as IT and engineering leaders in our Cloud transformation initiatives. In this video, I want to dive deeper into each one of the cloud operating model layers to be able to help all of us understand what it's going to entail and how we can leverage these different components within each layer to be able to realize our Cloud transformation initiatives.
Adopting the cloud operating model is going to be critically important for us as organizations as we strive to be able to gain additional operational efficiencies and determine how we should be structuring all of our organizations as part of this Cloud transformation. As I've mentioned previously, the cloud operating model contains five different layers. It starts out with the infrastructure layer, followed by the platform, the data, the application layer, and then finally the governance and security layer.
Now, each one of these layers is going to contain multiple subcategories within it, and it's those subcategories where we are going to be spending the most time in this video. How you as an organization adopt your organization strategy, your engineering teams, your infrastructure teams to this cloud operating model is going to be based on your organization, your business, and your business strategies and initiatives. So don't take this as gospel. We can really adapt this from an implementation perspective for each one of our organizations. Again, it's the cloud operating model is just that, it's a model or a framework that we as engineering and IT leaders need to determine how best to implement for our organizations.
When we think about the infrastructure layer, this is the layer that our IT organization are going to really have the most experience with. This is going to entail the infrastructure services. So we're specifically talking about storage, network, and compute if it's on-prem, or storage, network, and compute if it's in the public cloud as well, whatever it might be and however we're going to consume them. That's where the infrastructure services are going to be. We're also going to include things like capacity planning, observability, monitoring, security, as well as provisioning and orchestration for those infrastructure services. And each one of these subcategories is going to really be implemented based on what we need to improve on. Like I spoke about in the previous video, what is a cloud transformation? A cloud transformation is really going to focus more on the things that we're not doing so great, the things that we need to improve upon. Those are going to be our focus areas as we think about adopting the cloud operating model and how each one of these layers can help us address those weaknesses.
Once we've determined what that infrastructure layer is going to look like for us as an organization, it's really going to be crucial for us to be able to understand what those services that infrastructure layer is going to be provided. And it really doesn't matter if it's a private or a public cloud, and I can't say that enough. Really, as we're looking at a cloud transformation, it could be one or the other, public or private cloud. It could be a combination of the two, more of a hybrid cloud, where perhaps we're using the private cloud for our primary services and our primary applications and leveraging public cloud for just BCDR or some other disaster recovery like scenario or bursting capabilities. Or it could be a true multicloud architecture that we've come up where we're actively deploying applications to both a private and a public cloud service offering, and it's in active situation. So traffic is being generated and sent to both, and we're communicating between those different instances, regardless of whether they're private or public cloud. That really doesn't matter as we're talking about this cloud transformation. So whichever direction you're going down, this cloud operating model is really going to be crucial for you.
So again, once we've settled on what those infrastructural layer services, now we're going to move on to the platform layer. And again, the platform layer is probably just as crucially important as the infrastructure layer. And most organizations spend their time between these first two layers, really solidifying what they're going to be doing, what services they're going to be offering, how they're going to be hosting their applications as they look to adopt the cloud operating model.
The platform layer is going to include several subcategories. So we're going to be looking at things like orchestration and scheduling for the applications themselves. We're looking for automation and configuration and configuration management and drift type capabilities and services. We're going to be looking at service discovery. So now this isn't services that our infrastructure is providing for us, but these are rather services that the applications themselves will be providing out to either other layers or other teams within the cloud operating model or end users who are consuming our service or SaaS offering. We're also going to have app registry, right? What applications do we actually have running within our platform layer that others can consume from, as well as different platform services? And then finally, we're going to be thinking about the API and the proxy services that our platform is going to be providing.
Now, we're going to talk more about the technical aspects of the cloud operating model in a future video, but right now, I'm not specifically talking about any actual products. I'm talking about these as generic services or generic categories that the cloud operating model is going to provide or adhere to as we look to adopt it within our organizations. And I think that's important not to again associate specific products with each one of these categories where we're talking about it generally and how it's going to help us within our Cloud transformation. Again, each organization is going to implement these different layers and these different categories or subtopics within each one of these layers based on what their business strategies are and their business objectives and what their business really is trying to provide.
Now, once we're done with the platform layer, that's when we're going to move into the data layer. Now, the data layer is going to include data services. This is going to really be around where are we hosting, posting our data, how are we keeping it, you know, fidelity of our data, how are we adding resiliency into our data, how are we allowing others to access our data, as well as then having the analytics and the business intelligence associated with our data as well. How are others going to gain insights from all of this raw data that we've collected? And then finally, in one of the areas that I think is most crucial today and as we look forward into the future, especially again, I keep going back to this in these videos around generative AI and large language models, is really that data governance and compliance pieces. What are we going to be doing to make sure that our data stays our data and that it doesn't get leaked, it doesn't get hacked, it doesn't get sent out on the internet or accidentally included in a public large language model where maybe we don't want our proprietary or trademarked data to be included in?
So, data services layer. And again, while I don't specifically call out the security side of that, security is going to be contained within all of these layers, and there's going to be different components focused around security for each one of those layers. So when we think about that data governance and that data compliance, I assume, or you should assume, that security is built into that model.
Now, once we move beyond the data model, we're going to move into the application layer itself. Now, here is where we're going to start making some decisions around the development frameworks that we're going to be leveraging within our organizations, what tools are our DevOps groups and our engineers going to be consuming from, as well as DevOps and CI/CD in and of itself. So how are we going to adopt a DevOps model within our organization as part of this Cloud transformation that we're undergoing? And one of the crucial aspects for any Cloud transformation and any application modernization effort is really going to be focused on continuous integration and continuous development, that CI/CD pipeline. How are we going to make sure that we are streamlining our applications to be deployed more rapidly in a more agile manner so that we can see and realize the benefits from this Cloud transformation model, so that our end users can be able to begin to see more increases in feature enhancements, more bug fixes coming out on a regular basis? How often and how easily are we able to deploy out to production with zero to no impact for our end users for our applications and services?
And then finally, and this really ties into that CI/CD pipeline, is the last category within the application layer, which is the application lifecycle management. How are we going to be deploying these things? Is it going to be an A/B or a blue-green deployment? Are we going to be just upgrading individual components or microservices within the applications individually? Are we going to continue with these large pushes out to production, or are we going to give the development and the engineering teams the flexibility to implement and upgrade and replace individual components on a more rapid and frequent basis within our applications? These questions are all things that we're going to need to have answers for as we undergo this Cloud transformation and adopt the cloud operating model, and specifically are looking at the application layer.
The final layer of the cloud operating model is that governance and security layer. And again, there's going to be some level of governance and some level of security within each of the other layers, but this layer is really more focused on that governance and compliance. How are we handling our data? What compliance organizations or compliance sets do we need to be able to adhere to? How are we managing financial management? You know, how are we doing cost analysis for our different endpoints, for our different cloud offerings that we are either consuming from or providing out, as well as that service portfolio management? So ultimately, what services are we as an organization offering out, whether we are offering those things just to our internal consumers or to our external consumers who are generating revenue for the business?
And again, governance and compliance, you're going to see that seeded through each of these individual layers. And so it's not a one-and-done or an all-or-nothing type thing. It's going to be throughout all of these different layers, and it's going to be crucial on us to make sure that we've paid attention to how we are doing security, how we are applying governance to the data, to the applications, to the infrastructure. What are we consuming from? What endpoints out in the public cloud might be consuming from? Are they compliant with the organizations or the other companies or the other countries in which we are doing business? And this is really going to entail all of this force and really kind of tie up the cloud operating model for us in totality.
Again, how each of us as individual organizations adopt the cloud operating model is going to depend again on our business objectives, the business that we're in, what is most mindful for us for our board and for us as individual leaders. But the cloud operating model is going to allow us to be able to apply a singular framework to how we undergo this Cloud transformation. And so adopting this cloud operating model is really step one once we've decided that we're going to undergo a cloud transformation initiative. And we as leaders need to make sure that we are talking to our teams, communicating with our individual contributors, with our management and our directors, and all of our technical evangelists and leaders within both our IT, our operations, and our engineering organizations, so that they can understand how this cloud operating model is going to be a benefit to each one of them and ultimately bring all of the groups together to be working on one strategic effort to move forward with this Cloud transformation.
I appreciate you joining me in this conversation around the cloud operating model and how it's going to apply to you and your organizations as part of your Cloud transformation initiatives. In the next video, we're going to be going over how to assess our maturity so that we can understand where our strengths and where our weaknesses are as we start this Cloud transformation initiative and these strategies that we want to undergo and undertake in 2024 and beyond.
As always, if you're enjoying this content, please make sure that you subscribe to my YouTube channel, Virtual Elephant. Please make sure you turn on those notifications, you hit the like button, and leave me a comment and let me know what you think and how you as an individual, as an individual contributor, as an IT executive, or as an organization are currently making progress on your own cloud transformation initiatives and how this might be helping you.
As always, please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter at @ChrisMuchler, and I look forward to talking to you next time.