Overview
“Platform design supports innovation while required qualities and standards are safeguarded”
Building a firm cloud platform foundation sets the stage for easy and safe onboarding solutions and provides support to DevOps teams with controls and services, allowing them to efficiently develop and manage solutions in a controlled manner. The cloud platform ‘foundation’ consists of components mandatory for all solutions and shared services. The cloud-organisational structure, network patterns, security standards, auditability, identity and access management, monitoring, configuration management, automation and deployment standards, availability and restore, tagging and cost management standards are designed and implemented. Shared services used by applications – also SaaS applications, such as DNS, firewalling, container clusters, secrets stores, and application specific authentication solutions are also designed and implemented. ?
DevOps teams must be facilitated so the speed of innovation is not slowed down, while the qualities required by the business in the areas of confidentiality, integrity, availability, performance, scalability, maintainability, recoverability, flexibility and adaptability are safeguarded. ?
The services associated with the platform foundation relies on the cloud services offered by the cloud service provider and possibly also on solutions from third parties. Keep in mind that these services can be changed by the CSP. Services that offer more purpose, or cost less, may also be released. It is advisable to keep track of these changes and update the design.?
The cloud architect uses the cloud aware Enterprise Architecture as input for the design. If the foundation is managed by a managed cloud service provider, ensure that deployment/configuration code is owned by the customer and that methods, means and languages are generic, open source and/or transferrable.
Activities checklist
Initial:
- Applying enterprise architecture principles and vendor specific architecture frameworks to the platform design (see also: cloud focused enterprise architecture and enterprise architecture alignment)?
- Determining the separation of responsibilities between DevOps, other parties and the platform foundation?
- Designing the platform foundation services and patterns, e.g. the organisational structure (accounts/subscriptions), IAM construction, privileged accounts/RBAC, audit logging, networking patterns, disaster recovery scenarios.?
- Automating the management of the Foundation
Recurring:
- Periodically reviewing and improving the design?
- Customising design to include changes to Enterprise Architecture?
- Keeping track of newly released services and updates to existing ones and assess the impact on the Foundation
RASCI
| cloud consultant | transformation consultant | ||
| cloud architect | accountable | cloud partners | |
| cloud security specialist | supporting | DevOps team | informed |
| cloud developer | business stakeholder | ||
| cloud engineer | responsible | architecture | consulting |
| cloud analyst | security | consulting | |
| product owner CCoE | finance | ||
| management | procurement |