Executive Summary

In today’s complex enterprise IT environments, establishing effective cloud governance is critical for maintaining control, ensuring compliance, and optimizing costs across multiple cloud platforms. The meshStack Adoption Framework provides a proven, systematic approach to implementing cloud governance that has been validated through numerous successful customer deployments.
This framework addresses key challenges organizations face when scaling their cloud operations:

  • How to maintain control while enabling developer self-service
  • How to implement standardized processes across multiple cloud platforms
  • How to ensure compliance without sacrificing agility
  • How to optimize costs while supporting innovation

Introduction

As the Cloud Foundation Team, you are responsible for implementing a new cloud governance platform within your organization. The challenge is to enable the platform effectively and quickly, while also providing application teams with self-service capabilities, even though you have no prior experience with meshStack.

This document aims to present our insights and recommendations for the implementation of the meshStack platform. It is based on a multitude of successful enablements confirmed by our customers. Learn about the eleven steps to effectively organize the adoption of meshStack within your organization.

Step 1: Strategic Goal Setting for Cloud Governance Success

Setting goals is a vital part of the meshStack adoption process. Start with an assessment of your company’s strategy and involve key stakeholders. Most organizations focus on four key strategic areas:

  • Reducing operational efforts
  • Optimizing costs
  • Accelerating time to value/market
  • Enhancing compliance posture

From Strategy to Action

These broad goals need to be broken down into smaller, actionable objectives. Here’s how our customers typically approach this:

Reducing Operational Efforts

Automating the deployment and configuration of infrastructure, increasing reusability and reducing redundant efforts in managing the life cycle of cloud resources, and providing self-service options for end-users to manage cloud resources.

Optimizing Costs

Ensuring end-to-end cost transparency for users concerning their consumption of private and public cloud services, creating a catalog of recommended IT services that promote cost efficiency, best practices, and standardization, and minimizing redundancy and unnecessary variety of IT services.

Measuring Success

To make these objectives impactful, establish quantifiable criteria for measuring the fulfillment of your goals. Key metrics include:

  • Number of managed vs. unmanaged cloud applications throughout meshStack
  • User efficiency in obtaining cloud resources with and without the meshStack platform
  • Number of requests completed via self-service compared to those handled by dedicated operations teams
  • Savings due to end user cost transparency and efficient usage of cloud resources
  • Customer satisfaction regarding their experience with cloud services

Step 2: Essential meshStack Platform Knowledge & Capabilities

After identifying the strategic objectives for cloud governance, the next step is to master the efficient use of meshStack to meet these goals. The Cloud Foundation Team should acquire knowledge in several key areas:

  • Understanding the meshStack data model
  • Managing users and controlling access
  • Organizing cloud resources in meshStack according to best practices
  • Managing compliance
  • FinOps
  • Utilizing the marketplace
  • Overseeing service management
  • Defining responsibilities, such as the long-term roles of the Cloud Foundation Team and users

Step 3: Identity Provider Integration & User Authentication Strategy

Integrating Identity Providers (IdP) is a crucial aspect of cloud governance. Effective user management often requires policies that centralize user federation through a primary Identity Provider, such as Azure Entra ID, Okta, Auth0, etc. meshStack is compatible with widely-adopted identity federation technologies including LDAP, SAML, and OpenID. By integrating meshStack with a customer’s IdP, it ensures adherence to existing identity management policies and facilitates seamless user onboarding.

Step 4: Cloud Asset Organization & Resource Management

Thorough preparation of meshStack, particularly your inventory of existing cloud applications, is crucial for effective cloud governance. Once you have built your knowledge around the meshStack data model and best practices, you can begin to organize your assets within meshStack. Here are the steps to prepare:

  • Compile a list of all platforms and landing zones that require management in meshStack.
  • Establish naming conventions for objects within the meshStack data model.
  • Review and refine user roles as necessary. meshStack offers three default roles: Admin, User, and Viewer. Consider carefully if additional roles are required.
  • Determine the metadata to be stored in meshStack, along with workspaces, projects, tenants, and payment methods. For metadata, decide which are mandatory and which are optional. Mandatory metadata greatly improves the quality of information managed in meshStack and aids in achieving higher compliance but also demands more management effort. Metadata examples include environment type, application ID, cost center, business unit, product owner, etc. Develop tags and values based on this metadata.
  • Assemble a list of existing tenants and allocate them to appropriate landing zones, platforms, projects, workspaces, and owners.
  • Lastly, formulate compliance rules.

Step 5: Platform & Landing Zone Implementation Strategy

Managing your cloud environment begins with the establishment of Platforms and Landing Zones. These are essential components of meshStack that facilitate the operation or hosting of your business applications.

In meshStack, each AWS, Azure, or GCP organization you have is enabled as a Platform. You have the option to import a Platform either manually or through Terraform automation, based on your preference.

A Landing Zone is analogous to an AWS Organizational Unit (OU), a GCP Folder, or an Azure Management Group. It organizes cloud environments in alignment with their characteristics or specific requirements such as:

  • The type of workload (production, QA, development, or sandbox)
  • Regulatory compliance needs
  • Subdivisions within the company

Step 6: Cloud Application Migration & Onboarding Process

Integrating applications into meshStack unleashes the full potential of cloud governance. Before an application can be onboarded into meshStack, it must meet specific criteria established during the planning and design phase of meshStack. These criteria may include having an assigned application owner, a designated cost center, and a specified type of environment. Onboarding applications without this essential information will yield minimal benefits.

The initial import process of applications allows for the validation of previously made assumptions concerning the organization of meshStack. This includes tags, compliance rules, naming conventions, landing zones, and other configurations. If needed, these settings should be adjusted prior to the extensive import of all applications.

If all applications are already operating within landing zones that adhere to best practices in security, cost efficiency, design, and manageability, then onboarding is considered successful. However, there may be applications still running in legacy, unmanaged Landing Zones. These create silos within the IT landscape and can negatively impact your cloud strategy.

To address this issue, it is advisable to plan for the migration of tenants from unmanaged to new landing zones that are overseen by the Cloud Foundation Team. This ensures that ultimately, your entire cloud environment is managed and regulated. Migration begins with a comprehensive gap analysis between the current and target environments where the application will operate. Factors to consider include:

  • Technical prerequisites for running the application, such as network setup and cloud services utilization. Does it require specialized configurations or equipment?
  • Regulatory, legal, or compliance obligations. For instance, must the application operate exclusively within the EU? Is it subject to HIPAA or GxP regulations?
  • Billing considerations.
  • Organizational structure.
  • Control policies and limitations.

These migration criteria are instrumental in planning and subsequently executing the transition of cloud applications from an unmanaged to a controlled environment.

Step 7: New Application Management & Cloud Resource Provisioning

At this point, you are prepared to provision cloud environments for your applications via meshStack. Initially, it is advisable for the Cloud Foundation team to oversee provisioning to acquire practical experience with meshStack and to refine user processes and workflows related to the lifecycle of their business applications.

Step 8: Service Marketplace Development & Building Block Strategy

Standardization is a common challenge for Cloud Foundation Teams and architects. The meshStack Marketplace serves as an online service catalog, delivering Platform Services to application teams. Its primary aim is to provide end users with approved, standardized solutions through self-service, thereby reducing operational overhead and enhancing architectural consistency and agility.

In addition to provisioning cloud environments for end users, the Marketplace can also distribute smaller segments of cloud infrastructure, known as Building Blocks. To increase Marketplace adoption, it’s crucial to identify and facilitate the most prevalent Building Block use cases. The Cloud foundation team must determine how to:

  • Develop a strategy to encourage user participation in the Marketplace, recognizing that collaboration is essential for its success.
  • Coordinate and instruct users on offering Building Blocks in the Marketplace
  • Establish quality gates for services in the Marketplace, ensuring only approved solutions are available
  • Supply templates and documentation for Building Blocks

Step 9: Enterprise IT Service Integration & Workflow Design

Modern IT environments are complex ecosystem comprising hundreds or thousands of applications. Introducing a new service like meshStack necessitates its efficient integration with the existing IT services to maximize value and enhance user experience. Below are just a few examples of potential integrations with meshStack.

Inherently, meshStack plays a role in the application lifecycle, from provisioning to decommissioning, encompassing change management, application portfolio management, deployment, and application access, among other processes. Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) consolidate all configuration details such as facilities, ownership, and location, aiding in incident management, and impact and root cause analysis. meshStack oversees changes that may impact the CMDB, such as the deployment location of an application, the cloud provider, region, or tenant ID. Incorporating this information into the CMDB bridges the divide between the two systems, ensuring the CMDB continues to be the definitive source of configuration information.

Another common use case could be integrating meshStack with Financial services. Leveraging meshStack’s built-in functionalities, billing data associated with the consumption of cloud resources can be seamlessly exported through meshStack’s API. This data can then be integrated into the organization’s Financial services for effective cost allocation and internal customer chargeback processes.

Step 10: Platform Training Strategy & Documentation Framework

At meshcloud, we aim to streamline the user experience and continuously enhance the UI to provide the most intuitive and consistent platform. However, the Cloud Foundation Team is also responsible for creating user guides in various formats such as wikis, FAQs, video tutorials, etc., complementing the official documentation found at https://docs.meshcloud.io/.

The primary focus should be on detailing the specifics of internal processes for cloud management, such as budget approval procedures for payment methods, rules for naming workspaces and projects, descriptions of user roles, and compliance guidelines.

Step 11: Team Onboarding & Adoption Management

Onboarding application teams and equipping them with meshStack unleashes the platform’s full capabilities, allowing end users to create business applications on any supported private or public cloud platforms. This enhances cost transparency, agility, and compliance. Additionally, it promotes collaboration among different teams by enabling service sharing through the Marketplace, which increases standardization and minimizes redundant work.

Knowing your key collaborators and tailoring your meshStack strategy to meet their expectations is essential. Here is a list of diverse collaborators to consult:

  • Software developers and engineers
  • DevOps, SREs
  • Product owners
  • Project managers
  • Cloud architects
  • Head or Director of IT

Initially, it’s advisable to engage only one or a few application teams to use meshStack and gather their feedback. Encourage them to test various use cases, explore features, and voice any concerns. This feedback will help you refine processes, documentation, and the meshStack setup, eventually rolling it out across your entire organization.

Additional considerations

Measure the success

In the initial phase of your meshStack adoption, you have successfully identified goals, objectives, and quantifiable metrics to monitor the transformation’s progress from the current state to the desired cloud governance.

Furthermore, it may be beneficial to establish metrics for each of the previously outlined steps to gain a detailed perspective on individual progress and identify any potential bottlenecks that may occur between steps.

success factors to measure meshStack adoption

Dependencies

The steps outlined in this document represent a journey for the Cloud Foundation Team to implement the meshStack platform. Not every step is sequential; some can proceed simultaneously. Key steps like setting goals, organizing assets, or onboarding cloud platforms are pivotal to the platform’s implementation and must be accomplished prior to advancing further. Meanwhile, other tasks such as managing new applications, developing Building Blocks, and Marketplace can progress concurrently, as they are independent of each other.

Upon completing the "Onboarding application teams" step and after end users have utilized the platform for a set period, you may find it necessary to initiate the "adoption" workflow anew. This is due to the establishment of new objectives, the introduction of fresh requirements, and the reception of feedback from end users. It would not be an adoption per se, but rather a subsequent iteration of the cycle.

The illustration provided below offers a visual representation of the interconnections among the steps, showcasing their dependencies, potential sequencing, and opportunities for concurrent execution.