Today's episode focuses on the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure (CAF) with our guest, Global Engineering Lead for the CAF, Brian Blanchard. The CAF framework provides guidance for creating and implementing business and technology strategies for the cloud. We discuss moving your technology and business to Microsoft Azure and talk about some best practices for business decision-makers, cloud architects, and other technology leaders. We also talk about mistakes people can make along the way.
Today's episode focuses on the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure (CAF) with our guest, Global Engineering Lead for the CAF, Brian Blanchard. The CAF framework provides guidance for creating and implementing business and technology strategies for the cloud.
We discuss moving your technology and business to Microsoft Azure and talk about some best practices for business decision-makers, cloud architects, and other technology leaders. We also talk about mistakes people can make along the way.
Episode Links:
Guest:
Brian Blanchard is the Global Engineering Lead for the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure (CAF).
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Hosts:
Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
David Starr is a Principal Software Engineer in the Commercial Marketplace Services team at Microsoft.
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DAVID STARR: Welcome to the Azure for Executives Podcast, the show for technology leaders. This podcast covers trends and technologies in industries and how Microsoft Azure is enabling them. Here you'll hear from thought leaders in various industries and technologies on topics important to you. You'll also learn how to partner with Microsoft to enable your organization and your customers with Microsoft Azure.
All right, today on the show, we're discussing moving your technology and your business to Microsoft Azure. In this conversation, we'll talk about some of the best practices for business decision-makers, cloud architects, and other technology leaders. We'll also discuss some mistakes that people can make along the way. Now, specifically, we are focusing on the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure. This framework provides guidance for creating and implementing business and technology strategies for the cloud.
And here to join us in this discussion is the Global Engineering Lead for the Cloud Adoption Framework, Brian Blanchard. Brian is a hands-on cloud strategist and technology executive, also at Microsoft. And he's the Senior Director of the Cloud Adoption Framework. Brian, welcome to the show. It's great to have you.
BRIAN BLANCHARD: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
DAVID: You bet. It's going to be a great conversation. I'm sure that many of our listeners are going to be compelled by because it's right in their wheelhouse in terms of what the Cloud Adoption Framework offers. So with that, I'm curious what you've seen in your experience with working with executives and organizations. What are some of the more common issues that IT leaders face when adopting cloud?
BRIAN: So I've been involved in moving hundreds of customers to the cloud before I ever joined Microsoft and since worked with thousands of executives, and the challenges tend to be pretty similar. When we go from on-prem to the cloud, it feels like a technology change management process, but it's really more of a cultural shift and a pretty big paradigm shift at that.
As customers are going to the cloud, they're really trying to find ways to better compete in a quickly evolving digital market. And as they do that, they're realizing that they also have smarter ways to manage workloads. And this lets them think more broadly about how to distribute some decisions, delegate decisions out to the workload teams, and really accelerate speed to market and innovation. But at the same time, they're struggling with how do they maintain the right level of centralized controls for security, operations, governance, compliance, those sorts of things?
So the biggest challenge out of all that I see is IT leaders really trying to figure out how do I change my culture? How do I get from that command and control mindset to a mindset where our centralized staff inside of infrastructure technology are focused more on enabling speed and innovation? And that's a big part of what CAF focuses on is helping customers change the culture, implement processes to be successful on that new cloud-based culture, and implement the right technology and processes needed to support that broad portfolio of technologies that are inside of their wheelhouse.
PAUL MAHER: That's great, Brian. So let's talk a little bit more. And so I think that was a good introduction. But if I could take a step back for our listeners...and welcome to the show, Brian, great to have you here. And for our listeners here and, in particular, the decision-makers who are looking to bring their workloads into Azure, what does the framework offer them? How will it help them?
BRIAN: So the first part the framework helps with is, of course, that people process side, just figuring out how the future should look like for you. But when we get to that technical side of moving workloads, what we've realized is that there are three types of cloud adoption for workloads.
The first is you have a bunch of legacy stuff, stuff that's not changing very quickly, like your commercial off-the-shelf solutions. Some of those we want to take out to PaaS, but others you want to move to the cloud in more of an infrastructure as code type of model. So we help customers with that centralized IT movement of workloads; that's our first model that we see.
But then, beyond that, there's a percentage of those that really have a big substantial impact on the business, the areas that are going to drive your future revenue. And those who want to break out of that central management type of model and put them into their own workload-based management innovation operations type of model where they have their own landing zone and their ability to more easily implement new innovative technologies. So we help with figuring out that, how to break out those really mission-critical workloads so that you can support them individually.
And then there's kind of the in-between, workloads that are on custom build or built on a specific technology platform where the workload itself doesn't warrant investment, but you have to make that technological leap to pay off some technical debt. Maybe you're moving from IaaS running on servers to a bunch of Kubernetes clusters, and you want to centralize Kubernetes into one environment, and that'll get all your workloads on it.
Or you're trying to go hybrid for your workforce, and you want to centralize your virtual desktops in a single environment. And really figuring out how to centralize that technology but still enable that innovation of the individual workload teams. So we have guides for each of those three models that help customers from implementation all the way through to operations of those individual types of workloads.
PAUL: That's great, super helpful. So I heard you mentioned workloads, infrastructure as a service solutions. But is this tool for both infrastructure and service and platform as a service solutions? Is it one or the other? Both? Could we go a little deeper on that and help the listeners kind of understand a little bit more kind of you're thinking about their own personal situation and how this can help.
BRIAN: Yeah, gladly. The solutions that we build out inside Cloud Adoption Framework are designed to wrap around IaaS or PaaS equally. So it could be building the landing zone environment that supports them all or helping customers through that evolution from current state IaaS infrastructure to a more modern PaaS type of solution so that they can really capitalize on the benefits of the cloud. So it can help with both, and each are part of a spectrum of maturity that we see for customers going through cloud adoption life cycles.
PAUL: That's great. I'm just going to pick up one more, Brian, as well, because I think you kind of teed up a good lead-in which you mentioned about, of course, it helps both infrastructure as a service and platform as a service solutions, but I'd love to tease out a little bit more. You mentioned about you're providing guidance on the people who want to modernize and move away from infrastructure as a service towards platform as a service solutions. Could you elaborate a little bit more?
Because I'm sure a lot of folks out there, in particular, those who have more mature solutions, perhaps the incremental step to cloud was infrastructure as a service. But as we think about really embracing cloud and innovating and leveraging key services, platform as a service is a great opportunity for folks. So, could you elaborate a little bit more on how the framework really helps the folks with that?
BRIAN: Absolutely. So there are a couple of different models for cloud adoption, that one we talked about where you take on a new technology platform like AKS or APIM or App Service or any of these other more modern technology platforms. The Cloud Adoption Framework includes what we call landing zone accelerators. Those accelerators configure the environment and that technology platform in more of a centralized structure so that it's easier for workload teams to come in and just take advantage of those cloud-native platforms.
This is great if your Kubernetes team or your modernization team is kind of part of that central IT structure. Now, oftentimes, we'll see workloads that require more, and you have to get into a really deep architectural decision to make that transition. And this is where a pure framework, the Well-Architected Framework, comes in. If you've got to make those workload level decisions around modernizing pieces of the architecture or parts of that workload independent of any central services, that's when Well-Architected is a great tool to make sure you're doing the right combination of cloud-native and PaaS type of solutions for that one workload.
So there are a couple of different tools. If it's centralized, again, it's probably going to be more in the Cloud Adoption Framework to modernize a large number of workloads in a repeatable process. If it's something more specific to the workload and that modernization impacts the architecture of the workload itself, that's when we work with Well-Architected Framework really closely.
DAVID: So, in my reading and research on the Cloud Adoption Framework, I found that it models some lifecycle stages of cloud adoption. And I wonder if you could take us through those that the framework recognizes.
BRIAN: So, we tend to look at the overall cloud adoption lifecycle in three big buckets or phases. There's the pre-adoption stuff where the Cloud Adoption Framework is great for IT leaders and IT managers and the like to define your cloud strategy, make sure you're doing things for the right reasons and for the right financial justifications. And then building a cloud adoption plan to make sure that you're working against those strategies so that you're going to fulfill them in a timely manner.
Also, at that kind of pre-adoption stage, we have a methodology called CAF-ready, which is about reading your environment, your people, really getting ready for this change that you're about to make and, in particular, taking a crucial first step of making sure that you have the right environmental configuration to support whatever you're about to adopt. So strategy plan and ready that's kind of the pre-adoption motion.
Adopt then is that motion of actually adopting the cloud, and this is when we get into the thoughts of migrating a bunch of IaaS stuff, modernizing a bunch of things to cloud-native technologies, or setting up repeatable innovation cycles if we're building new. That's also where you'll see those landings on accelerators show up in what we call scenarios. So if you're trying to adopt a specific type of technology platform, we'll guide you through the whole process start to finish.
And then finally, we have the post-adoption bucket. And this tends to run in parallel to everything else I just said. And this is where we think through your overall security posture with the secure motions, overall centralized operations management for all your workloads with manage. And finally, how do you automate your operational decisions with the methodology we refer to as govern? And each of those help really build the confidence and the trust inside of your cloud platform so that you can adopt the way you need to without being concerned about the risks because you're prepared for them.
DAVID: I'm going to step back just a moment and focus on one of the things that you've mentioned a couple of times now, and that is preparing your people to make this transition to the cloud. And I'm wondering if you could elaborate on that just a little bit in terms of what it means for technology leaders to prepare their folks.
BRIAN: So in the plan methodology, we're putting together a plan of how are we going to fulfill this cloud adoption strategy? And most of the time, that plan has a significant dependency on new skills that weren't there before. So we either have to build a scaling plan for those people to help them understand what do they have to get really good at? Or we have to bring in third-party partners to help augment those skills. But either way, having that scaling plan down is critical to the success of cloud adoption.
And then we really see that come to life in ready. That ready phase is when we're building out that environment, making sure we've got governance, security, and operations management tooling in place, as well as converting over your existing network, your existing identity, your existing plans for how you organize resources, and how you manage those long term.
All those require a bit of a shift in the scaling of old school IT operations that you'd have on-prem to more of a modern cloud-native model for operations or, more commonly, a mix of the two, winning what works really well today on-prem with what works really well in the cloud. So you've got to unify the operating model that you can apply to both your data centers and your cloud assets. And all of that is part of that kind of pre-adoption stage where we build the skills, build the environment, really get ready for long-term success.
PAUL: That's great. Thank you, Brian. Let's talk about the Cloud Adoption Strategy Evaluator. So it was recently launched. So that sounds like an assessment tool. What is the evaluator tool? Can you help us learn a little bit more about it and its purpose?
BRIAN: Yeah, gladly. So each of those methodologies that we talked about inside of CAF has a corresponding assessment to some degree. The case tool or the Cloud Adoption Strategy Evaluator is an assessment that kind of looks across those. And it looks starting with your strategy and your plan and your scaling to make sure that you've got all the right pieces in place to be successful and even starts to tease out some of the things around what you'll need longer-term for operations.
And this is a very quick high-level assessment that helps you find gaps and find areas where it may be wise to invest before you start going forward with adoption so that your team is ready and that you're really prepared for what's going to come at you.
PAUL: Great. And just thinking it through, are there any best practices you would share with our listeners to really most effectively make use of the evaluator tool? Are there any learnings you could share?
BRIAN: I would say that that tool is best when you have multiple stakeholders in the company go through that assessment and provide their different perspectives. And that'll help you find gaps that maybe you as an IT leader may not see. Same thing is to apply that to some of your key architects to see if there are some of the bottom-up things that you might be missing. And this will help you really make sure that each of the different layers of your team are ready to go forward.
And from there, when the assessment is completed, it'll give you not just a score of where you're strong and where you need to invest a little bit more, but it also gives you very pointed guidance and links inside of Cloud Adoption Framework that you can use as a reference to build those skills up. So when you complete that with multiple different people, you'll end up with a number of steps that would be wise for you to look through and make sure that you adhere to for your team.
PAUL: That's great. Thank you. Let's pull it all together. So we've heard about the Cloud Adoption Framework. Thank you. That's been a great introduction, Brian. Our listeners really like to hear about the, you know, and so help me here and visualize kind of real customer success stories. So now that we've got folks and our listeners here on the baseline of knowledge, could you share some customer stories where they've been using the Cloud Adoption Framework just to really bring everything together? So people really understand, ah, now I understand what this is. Here are some key outputs that you've seen from these customer stories.
BRIAN: Yeah, gladly. One of the easiest stories to follow is one that we pulled together inside of the Learn modules for Cloud Adoption Framework and actually walks through a customer narrative of a customer that wasn't too well set up for success and how each of the methodologies helped them along their way. Likewise, beyond that, --
PAUL: Brian, I'm sorry to jump in because you mentioned another great kind of learning piece of collateral. You mentioned the Learn modules. Could you just take a moment to explain what the Learn modules are?
BRIAN: Inside of Microsoft, we have a platform called Learn; it's in the Docs Microsoft platform. The Learn modules provide a way to engage with different types of technical content and evaluate your skills as you go along. In particular, there's a learning path on the Cloud Adoption Framework that will guide you through each of the methodologies. And because CAF is so contextual, we have a customer narrative that we follow through with each of what we call the modules.
Each module is designed to solve a different problem in cloud adoption, and it goes into detailed people process and technology implementation to help take advantage of those. So that learning path for Cloud Adoption Framework tells one great story that we refer to as Tailspin trader. It's kind of a mid-market customer that wasn't quite ready for their cloud journey and needed to strengthen some things to be successful. But there are many other stories.
Each of the methodologies themselves has a different potential value or customer story to talk about. One really recent one, we had a large government entity inside of the U.S. that was struggling to get going with the cloud. And when we started to engage with them, we realized that strategically, they didn't quite understand as a team why. So we used strategy and planning to help them understand why they're going to the cloud, which then made it easier to translate that into a technical plan.
Once we understood the why, we realized that governance for that organization was just critical to their success. So we used the governance and the ready phase or methodologies of CAF to help them build out an environment that met all their governance and compliance needs. From there, when those pieces were in place, it was easy to unlock the rest of the organization and let hundreds of individual workload teams go about adopting the cloud with a great deal of confidence.
As a result, we were able to migrate a total of 20 different data centers to the cloud in less than 24 months, really releasing their dependence on traditional physical hardware, freeing up a ton of CapEx, and allowing that organization to continue to innovate and advance and build on top of the cloud. And likewise, most of the Fortune 500 in the U.S. have some degree of a similar story based on the Cloud Adoption Framework, especially the largest Azure customers from Microsoft.
DAVID: Those are great representative examples, so I really appreciate that. And that's a key part of the story, so good stuff. And you mentioned some successes; I'd like to explore a little bit about what organizations might experience along the way in terms of mistakes they might make. Because I know that with any organization that is moving to cloud, there are some common missteps that they might hit and get a little ouch from them and maybe back up and sort of pause their effort or maybe come back again later. So if you could, what are some common things that organizations might struggle with?
BRIAN: That's a great question. So in each of the methodologies of CAF, there's an article called anti-patterns that just captures some of those common missteps. And I'd say most of the common missteps involve people just trying to go too fast or not thinking broadly enough. Because when it comes to migrations, the technology in Azure makes that easy. At the end of the day, if you're doing a migration, all we're doing is copying a bunch of binary off of a disk on-prem to a disk in the cloud. And then we're standing up a server based on that binary. That's a pretty easy process that our Azure migrate tool has pretty well mastered.
So the migration of servers is easy. I've been involved in some migrations where over the course of a weekend, we lit up 20,000 servers, and things were live. But the problem isn't with that migration; the problem is everything else around it. Do we have proper processes in place to make sure we're doing load testing and that we make sure that end users are having a similar experience? Or even before that, have we looked at the network topology and connectivity to make sure we've got proper routing channels to make sure that end-users aren't stuck in a network loop that makes it appear like they have a degrading performance? Or have we thought about governance and security?
One of the most common blockers I see is customers who don't think ahead of what they need to secure their cloud implementation. They get close to migration, close to launch; everything's ready to go. It seems like it's working great. The see-saw comes in and stops it dead in its tracks because they violated some security policy. So when we think about the broader things that happen operationally long term, we can make the migration much easier. And those operational pieces are the ones that tend to trip people up as they go through an adoption process.
DAVID: Okay, those are some really good examples, and I've seen some of those myself, so good stuff there. As we start to wrap up here, I wanted to ask one more thing, and that is if there are maybe some key takeaways you'd like to share with the listeners. For example, what can they do to get started with Cloud Adoption Framework?
BRIAN: The Cloud Adoption Framework is baked into most of the major programs inside of Microsoft that have to do with Azure adoption. If you're working with a Microsoft field team, meaning you have a sales representative and account executive, one of those, ask them about the AMMP program, the Azure Migration, and Modernization Program. That's a program that, if you qualify for it, Microsoft will come in and help make sure you're overcoming some of these early-stage blockers, aligning support from a partner to help make sure you get there successfully.
If you don't qualify for that, that's okay. There are a lot of things that you can do that are self-service, like the Cloud Adoption Framework Discover Workshops, the Microsoft Learn modules that we talked about earlier. We also have a channel on YouTube called the Azure Enable Channel, which has a ton of short videos about different pieces of Microsoft that you can reference to really help build your skills and get going.
Or, as we talked about earlier, starting with that assessment site looking at the Cloud Adoption Strategy Evaluator, or the governance benchmark, or the new Azure landing zone review, which will help you figure out if your environment is properly configured. These are all great assessments that can help you overcome blockers that you might be running into. So those are a number of programs you can use.
Or, if you'd like, you can dive right into the guidance inside of the Cloud Adoption Framework. The only thing I'd caution is that the guidance itself is meant to capture all of the potential things you might experience. You're not going to want to read it all. You want to read the pieces that are relevant to blockers that you may have in your environment.
DAVID: With that, you're saying Cloud Adoption Framework has some pretty good volume and heft behind it, yeah?
BRIAN: It does, yeah. Because of the nature of the many various different blockers customers can run into organizationally and procedurally, we had to cover quite a few of them, and that took a lot of words. Most customers aren't going to use more than 10% or 20% of that guidance. So it's important to focus on the things that will really help you with the problems you're facing today to unblock cloud adoption.
DAVID: Perfect. Okay. This has been just a wonderful conversation, Brian, and I appreciate you being on the show.
BRIAN: Thanks for having me. It's been great.
DAVID: Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Azure for Executives Podcast. We love hearing from you. And if you have suggestions for topics, questions about issues discussed on the show, or other feedback, contact the show hosts, David Starr or Paul Maher, through the social media links included in the show notes for each episode. We look forward to hearing from you.