Cloud Foundation: 3 valuable Players on the Field

Building Cloud Foundations can be cumbersome and tedious. In this post we’ll introduce 3 of our offerings in that field that will make your life easier.

If you are an Enterprise Architect and/or responsible for your organization’s Cloud Center of Excellence or Cloud Foundation Team this post is for you.

It will show you ways to accelerate your Cloud Journey, provide insights on Cloud Foundation best-practices and finally demonstrate how our offerings play together to help you build the best Cloud Foundation.

The Cloud Foundation Maturity Model – Getting Clarity

As a member of your Cloud Foundation Team, you may have come across the Cloud Foundation Maturity Model (CFMM). It’s a strategic model that helps you understand the capabilities you’ll need to build up during your Cloud Journey, regardless of which clouds you use, where you’re currently at or what approach to implementation you have taken.

You can consider it the coach on the playing field. It gives you guidance, shows where you’ll want to go and provides insights into different implementation options that will get you there.

We have used this model successfully with leading cloud-native organizations from various industries.

Building Cloud Foundations is an Iterative Process

Lots of organizations we work with run thousands of applications in the cloud, managed by a central Cloud Foundation Team. However, they didn’t get there within a day. Implementing a Cloud Foundation is best approached with an iterative approach. You start with the basics and implement more and more sophisticated capabilities over time as you get to know more about your users and their requirements.

The Cloud Foundation Maturity Model helps you to break the journey down into small steps that systematically build upon each other.

It’s not only about how far along the Cloud Journey you are, but also what type of vehicle you’re using

When Cloud Foundation Teams are faced with large-scale cloud migration projects, they know that whatever Cloud Foundation capabilities they build they’ll have to be highly automated in order to keep up with the upcoming scale of cloud demand.

That’s why we cover two dimensions when it comes to maturity within our Cloud Foundation Maturity Model:

1. Journey Stage: Varying from Essential building blocks (1) to Industry Leading capabilities (5)
2. Implementation Maturity: Varying from manual to fully automated

Assessing both brings you valuable insights when evaluating the current state of your Cloud Foundation and that’s exactly what the Cloud Foundation Maturity Model can be used for.

As a result, you’ll have a structured analysis of your Cloud Foundation, demonstrating your achievements as well as areas you’ll need to improve on a single page, which makes it a great tool for internal communication.

Collie – A Trustworthy Helper On Your Way To Cloud Foundation Maturity

Most organizations start their cloud journeys in high spirits on a green field. By the time you realize that you need proper cloud governance and decide to establish a Cloud Foundation, the once green grass has turned into a brownfield landscape. Collie is an open-source multi-cloud CLI that helps exploring and sorting, preparing for systetmatic management. It’s built for power-users, single player.

Collie CLI easily provides multi-cloud transparency on cloud tenants, corresponding access rights, tags and cost information. In regard to the Cloud Foundation Maturity Model it will help you to implement the following building blocks:

• Cloud Tenant Database
• Multi-Cloud Tenant Database
• Cloud Tenant Tagging
• Multi-Cloud Tagging Policy
• Monthly Cloud Tenant Billing Report

To fully automate your cloud foundation capabilities and establish collaboration between the Cloud Foundation and your DevOps teams, you’ll need to go one step further and use a platform like meshStack that reflects this organizational model.

meshStack – Your Cloud Foundation Platform

At meshcloud, we focus on enabling DevOps teams to use cloud and speeding up their applications’ time-to-market. Providing self-service access to native cloud tenants like AWS accounts, GCP projects or Azure subscriptions is critical to achieve this.

We know that every organization is unique and comes with specific requirements, especially in regard to the integration of existing IT Landscapes. Our aim with meshStack is to help you get the basics right and enable you to build upon them.

That’s why a lot of Cloud Foundation capabilities come out-of-the-box, while others can flexibly be adapted to your organizations’ needs.

In general there are 3 ways meshStack can help you to implement Cloud Foundation Building Blocks.

• meshStack provides this Cloud Foundation Building Block out-of-the-box

  

  Example: When using meshStack in a multi-cloud setup, you’ll have a Self-Service Multi-Cloud Tenant Database, out-of-the-box.

• meshStack enables strong facilities for an easy implementation of that building block

  

  Example: With Landing Zones and Services you’ll have everything you need to implement Modular Landing Zones.

• There are established solution patterns that facilitate the implementation of this building block, when using meshStack

  

  Example: There is an established solution pattern that will help you provide managed Service Accounts with meshStack.

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In The End It’s About the People

Our offerings aim to help organizations throughout their entire Cloud Foundation journey:

• From understanding and defining the Cloud Foundation for your organization based on our Cloud Foundation Maturity Model
• to analyzing and understanding existing cloud landscapes with Collie CLI
• all the way to implementing large-scale Cloud Foundation Platforms to manage thousands of teams and applications based on meshStack.

However, establishing a Cloud Foundation within an organization is not only about building up the relevant capabilities and deciding on implementation options. It also is a huge organizational shift that requires involvement of all stakeholders and great communication across teams and up to the C-Level.

By allowing organizations to easily experience the power of self-service and providing means for internal communications, we want to enable Cloud Foundation Stakeholders to drive acceptance for change throughout the entire organization in order to pave the way for a new way to organize IT.