Watch this new series to help you navigate and adopt the cloud

17th December 2020 Anthony Mashford 0 Comments

Whether you are just embarking on your cloud journey or you are looking to maximize business value out of your existing cloud investments, you may want to leverage industry best practices and technical guidance we have compiled in Azure documentation, from working with many engineers, customers, and partners.

At the core of this guidance, to help you continually adopt and operate in the cloud, there is the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure that provides a set of tools, guidance, and best practices that help shape technology, business, and people strategies for driving the desired business outcomes during your cloud adoption effort, and the Azure Well-Architected Framework which is a set of guiding tenets that you can use to improve the quality of your Azure workloads.

There is a lot of knowledge already shared and it is constantly improving and growing, which makes it sometimes challenging to keep up with the latest and greatest, whether you are adopting or already operating in the cloud. However, read on to learn about this new way to help you navigate and successfully adopt Azure.

Announcing the Azure Enablement show

In line with our efforts to support your cloud journey, we're pleased to announce the launch of the Azure Enablement show. It is a series of technical conversations with a community of Microsoft experts, addressing common questions and challenges in your cloud adoption journey.

The show introduces two series aligned to key resources that support your cloud journey—the Cloud Adoption Framework and the Azure Well-Architected initiative. The show format is interview-based and conversational style with the host of the series driving the discussion with multiple experts. For the Cloud Adoption Framework series, the host is Sarah Lean—an IT engineer and advocate with a passion for helping others and sharing her experiences. And the Azure Well-Architected series host is David Blank-Edelman—who is also a tech community leader in the Site Reliability Engineering space with a passion for building and operating systems that work well for people.

Series 1: Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure

The Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure series has three modules right now: Introduction, Azure landing zones, and Governance. Our goal with the introductory module is to help anyone who is getting started with their cloud journey to understand how to leverage the Cloud Adoption Framework. This module has two episodes—Overview of the Cloud Adoption Framework and Assess your cloud readiness using Microsoft Assessments. They offer a good foundation and help answer questions like ‘What is the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework?’ ‘How can you get started?’ ‘What benefits do you get by using Microsoft Assessments?’ and ‘What help is available for additional training and support to help you in your journey?’

Episode one: Overview of the Cloud Adoption Framework

Episode two: Assess your cloud readiness using Microsoft assessments

The second module in the series is focused on Azure landing zones, a set of architecture guidelines, reference implementations, and code samples based on proven practices to prepare cloud environments. Sarah Lean and the experts talk about the different implementation options for Azure landing zones, and the eight key design areas that you should consider before choosing the right implementation option. This module will help you prepare your cloud environment with the necessary governance, compliance, and operational requirements specific to your organization's needs.

Episode one: Prepare your cloud environments using Azure landing zones

Episode two: Choosing the best Azure landing zone option

Episode three: 'Start small and expand' Azure landing zones approach

Episode four: Create an enterprise-scale architecture in Azure

Episode five: Dig into enterprise scale architecture methodology

The third module in this debut version of the show focuses on the governance methodology of the Cloud Adoption Framework which guides you through the process of striking a balance between control and compliance on one side, and delivering speed and agility on the other, while you adopt the cloud. In this module, speakers discuss the governance approach, which at a high level involves understanding the risks of moving to the cloud, creating policies to mitigate those risks, drawing boundaries for cloud adoption, and eventually implementing those policies across the five disciplines of governance.

Episode one: Establish cloud governance and compliance

Episode two: Implement cost control, budget, forecast, and allocation

Episode three: Identity baseline with authentication and access control

Episode four: Implement security baseline through corporate policy

Episode five: Cloud governance using IaC, Azure Policy, and Blueprints

Episode six: Govern and manage Azure resources at scale

Series 2: Azure Well-Architected

The Azure Well-Architected series is aimed at helping you build, design, and manage high quality workloads in Azure. In this series, you will see us modelling the conversations Microsoft experts have with customers as they work towards a well-architected state that allows them to thrive in the cloud. In these modules, we see real examples of customer problems and how experts solve them.

Like the Cloud Adoption Framework series, the Well-Architected series also has three modules—Introduction, Cost Optimization, and Reliability. The introduction module provides an overview of the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework, which provides technical guidance at the workload level across five pillars—cost optimization, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and operational excellence. The speakers discuss the Azure Well-Architected Review, which helps you determine the crucial aspects you will need to evaluate your workloads on. There are a couple episodes dedicated to getting the most out of Azure Advisor, a free Azure service that analyzes your workloads and offers suggestions based on best practices from the Well-Architected Framework.

Episode one: Architect successful workloads on Azure: Introduction module

Episode two: Ask the right questions about your Azure workloads

Episode three (Part 1): Essential advice for improving Azure workloads

Episode three (Part 2): Essential advice for improving your Azure workloads

The next module covers the cost optimization pillar of the Well-Architected Framework, and talks about how to manage costs and get the most value from your Azure workloads. The speakers in this module discuss a process for determining the most critical steps to take to realize real cost efficiencies. They also have a deeper conversation around strategic and tactical approaches you can use to optimize Azure costs in the short and long term.

Episode one: Start optimizing your Azure costs

Episode two (Part 1): Diving deeper into Azure cost optimization

Episode two (Part 2): Diving deeper into Azure cost optimization

The final module in the series covers reliability, another concern directly addressed by the Well-Architected Framework. The host and speakers talk about reliability in a cloud context, the difference between platform reliability and application reliability, and what actions and resources customers can use to start addressing their reliability concerns. This is followed by a deep dive into evaluating Azure workload reliability and how to improve it—touching on the design for failure philosophy and other reliability-focused best practices.

Episode one: Start improving the reliability of your Azure workloads

Episode two (Part 1): Diving deeper into Azure workload reliability

Episode two (Part 2): Diving deeper into Azure workload reliability

More learning resources to enable your cloud journey

In addition to the show on Channel9 platform, there are other learning resources available to you. Here is a list of some of those that you may want to review:

Microsoft Learn modules

Azure blogs

Other resources

We will continue to support your cloud adoption efforts by creating rich content and guidance in our documentation assets and more specifically add new episodes in the Azure Enablement show. Subscribe to the show on Channel9 to receive updates and let us know what you think.

Source: Azure Blog Feed

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