AWS re:Invent 2020: Transform your organization’s culture with a Cloud Center of Excellence

hi welcome to reinvent welcome to architecture session 315. have you been in a situation where you have migrated into the organ your organization into cloud and you have identified multiple lines of business for using cloud for different purposes and then your there was no commonality or you were surprised by the bill that you got at the month end my name is mahesh guram i'm a principal solutions architect at amazon web services today we are going to talk about transforming your organization's culture with cloud center of excellence to avoid some of the common pitfalls we see customers have in their cloud journey this will help you avoid time resources money and help you improve speed to market so for the next 30 minutes we are going to talk about what has cloud changed and what new challenges it has bought along with it and how can cloud center of excellence help you with it we will talk about who benefits from cloud center of excellence how to form your first cloud center of excellence team and then we will talk about how it evolves over a period of time and finally i'll give you a couple of examples and give you some next steps and good pointers to take it away let's look at what cloud has changed cloud has dramatically changed the way we perceive technology there are some of the top trends that we have been seeing our customers with the changes in the cloud the first one is capacity and provisioning before cloud we used to have this fixed capacity where you either had to do trade-offs between applications or you are over provisioned moving into the cloud that has dramatically changed you have now unlimited capacity and every service is just an api call away and this has enabled teams to be more self-sufficient and have services on demand but at the same time it also has new challenges every developer or every team now has a capability to launch anything in the cloud so you still want to have checks and balances so that's an important challenge you want to deal with the second trend we are seeing is with the way you do asset and cost allocations pre-cloud you are having one fixed budget which you had to plan for months or years in the head to do that but moving into the cloud you have lots of elasticity placed in and so you only provision for the bare minimum you need and you scale up and scale down using cloud elasticity whenever you need to and this model has enabled our some of the teams to remove any barriers if they had any while they were entering into the cloud right so they can try new services if they like it they can re invest more in it if they don't like it they can just move on shutting down and just pay for the resources they have used so this is a huge huge change but at the same time you also want the ability to know which of those experiments were successful which of them were not and be able to charge back accordingly so this has enabled lot of good experimentation again in a pre-cloud era your experimentation was not really encouraged failures were not an option because you had these monthly releases that were done once a month and if something went wrong rolling back was a nightmare but moving into the cloud we are seeing a lot of customers adopt to small reversible changes which can be iterated on a regular basis and learning what your customer likes and what they don't like you can adopt to the changing needs of your customers and the way you handle change in the cloud as well has changed so before you used to have different teams like you had your requirements team you had your development team and projects moved from requirements to development in a pretty much a waterfall model but moving into the cloud we are seeing a lot of customers go into more of a devops and agile methodologies where they are able to have cross-functional teams and where they can make these small reversible changes and as we talked about having a lot of these before and finally the way you transform your organization has changed in the sense that we are moving away between the pre cloud you used to have a lot of standardizations and these standardizations were very rigid and they were standard across your entire organization so we are moving away from that into more of a use case centric reference architectures where you have guardrails established by your architectural teams and this enables lot of non-iit users use cloud and also adopt these newer technologies so as you can see here there are a lot of changes that have happened getting into the cloud but at the same time there are a lot of challenges you want to have a good insight into how your finances are being spent you want to have good insight into the governance and security on who can do what and also you want to know how many changes are being deployed and how frequently they are deployed which of them are successful and which of them are not and because everyone can use cloud you also want to make sure you're not having any compliance challenges and regulation challenges especially if you are in a regulatory environment so as much as the benefits you get from the cloud there are also some of the challenges so now let's see how can we deal with these challenges that we have the first so the way we are going to do it is look at cloud center of excellence so as you can see this is a definition of cloud center of excellence by cloud management report if you look at it there are a couple of ways couple of words that i want you to look at the cross functional right so cloud center of excellence is no more just the i.t team it has representation from multiple different segments and multiple different teams within your organization what cloud center of excellence does it takes the best practices that we at aws publish understand those best practices more from a why is this best practice what is the importance of this best practice and customize that specific to your organization and help your entire organization understand that best practice in a customized way this is very important especially in things where where you have regulatory needs and also when we are releasing newer technology you want someone in there to allow to do all the proof of concepts and adapt to your needs it also helps you with establishing your governance and security practices and in general it helps you lead your organization into through your cloud journey into the cloud it also helps you with migration on which application should be migrated whether they should be left on-prem they should be migrated if so when should it be migrated and how they should be migrated if you look at the overall picture as i just talked about it's a cross-functional team with lot of responsibilities so now let's look at what are some of the benefits that cloud center of excellence will provide you the first benefit is it will help you provide with some structure and operations so as i started this presentation if you have organization which has either just moved into the cloud or is already in the cloud with multiple lines of business you always want to have a specified structure across your organization and cloud center of excellence will help you have that structure across the entire organization it will then also give you a do evaluations cloud is a very fast changing environment and we are releasing a lot of new technology and lot of new features every day so cloud center of excellence will help you evaluate those new technologies as they come out and also the new features and understand what how it fits into some of your existing architectures and if it is a totally new technology it will give you guidance on how to use that new technology in either new products or embed into your existing ones and governance and security is also something cloud center of excellence will provide you security is job zero at aws and we want it to be job zero for all our customers cloud center of excellence will help you with defining the security policies and also defining what is the metadata that each element in the in aws should be needed so it helps you with the governance and security finally it helps you with innovation because of the new technology that we have it enables your developers your teams your thinkers in your organization to think about the art of the possible and having think big ideas enabling lot of innovation and enabling your company to come up with new products and finally it will help you on standardize and automate and identify those opportunities where you can standardize it across your entire organization and also identify opportunities to automate repeatable tasks across your organization so that if something is done within a line of business it can be socialized for across your entire organization so let's talk about who will benefit from cloud center of excellence the first benefit we will see is from a customer standpoint because of the enabled innovation you will see lot of customers having new products which are very customized to them individually and personalized to their preferences because of the insights with the new technology the cloud center of excellence will help you adapt to the second beneficiary would be your organization because now you are ready to adapt to these new technologies and use the new technology to come up with these innovative products for your customers and the leadership will have accelerated innovation because what we already talked about having that enablement of new technology with structure will enable with new with will enable innovation and the business with all these amazing insights that you can provide will be able to tap into some untapped markets that they never have thought about before from an i.t perspective because of the

automation lot of these repeatable tasks that have been done are automated which means they can focus their their resources on doing something more creative so if you look at the overall picture everyone from your organization to all the layers are being benefited through cloud center of excellence so now let's talk about who should be part of your cloud center of excellence and how do you form your first team so before we go to forming your team there are some characteristics we strongly see cloud center of excellence team members have before they are part of the cloud center of excellence team so let me take a moment to talk about these characteristics the first thing is ability to influence so as we talked before cloud center of excellence is a cross-functional team which means the individuals have to go back to their respective teams and make sure the decisions that are made as part of the cloud center of excellence are being implemented so they have they need to be someone who will be able to go back and explain and influence others within their respective teams to follow these standards the second thing is they want you want someone who is results oriented who is someone who is driven by the data so as we collect more and more of this data especially as we try new technologies or come up with reference architectures you want someone who is driven by results rather than just their individual feelings so someone driven by data someone driven by experimentation is another key thing that you want someone should have the ability to accept when something does not go the way you expect because again cloud center of excellence should be one of the key responsibilities is to evaluate new technology and also come up with the standards that you need across your organization so you want someone who can experiment learn from what has gone well and also learn from when things don't go your way and have the ability to decide that and be bold in making certain decisions when you have to move on on certain experiments at the same time you want some of the cloud center of excellence team to be very bold in the decisions they make as well and finally we want to talk about customer focused so we want someone who is always working backwards from your customer so that you are trying to solve some of the challenges your customers are having today so you want someone who is customer focused so if you look at it these are some of the characteristics that we have seen a normal a successful cloud center of excellence team player would have so let me move on to talk about some of the roles that we typically see in a cloud center of excellence again these roles that i am going to talk about are very generic and some of the roles are what we have seen in the industry by no means these are the only roles that you have to look at at the center of your entire cloud center of excellence we want a very strong leadership these are people who can go and get things done when needed when a cloud center of excellence team makes a decision these are the people who can enforce it if it comes to that point so typically these roles are filled like filled by someone like a chief data officer or chief information officer based on how you have and sometimes they are also filled by chief architect again the primary role is someone who has the thought vision of the forward and can get things done the first stakeholder to this table is security as i previously said security is job zero for us so you want security at the table to get the perspective of what are the compliances that you have what are the security risks you have in your industry or within your organization especially moving into the cloud so these roles again is typically filled by someone like a director of security or chief information security officer as well anyone from your security line of business would do the next role is infrastructure infrastructure is extremely key because this is what gets everything together in cloud so you want someone who understands the networking as well as who understands how networking is done in the cloud so you want both your security and your infrastructure team members not only to understand what security and infrastructure is on premises or in your organization but also understand how it is done in the cloud and also understand the best practices of the cloud again the infrastructure role normally is filled by network engineer or middleware engineer someone like that the next one to the table is operations it is a very important role if you think about it is because of one of the key differences between your on-premises and your cloud is a scalability so you want someone who understands that and how do you optimize for that how do you opt what is your minimum bare minimum you need and when do you scale up when do you scale down you don't want you do not want to scale up unnecessarily when there is no demand so you want someone who understands again all of that who has good understanding of the capacity planning again who has good knowledge of cloud and also incident management when something goes wrong in the cloud how do you handle it how do you debug it so someone with that kind of background and finally you want someone from your applications team as well this could be your enterprise architect solution architect or a dev lead someone which has the background of development right so if you look at it this is the core team we normally have in any close center of excellence right if you look at it you have different stakeholders from different are getting getting data from different perspectives trying to make one decision and again by no means these roles that i have here are the only ones that you want you actually can customize this to your organization's specific needs apart from this we also have some advisory roles so the difference between your core role and your advisory role is you basically tap in into your advisory roles whenever you need them so let's look at some of the key ones of course the risk and compliance is very important because security is again very important especially when you're in a regulatory environment where you have certain regulations that you want to follow and you want to have to make sure you have all the all the data protections that you need if you are in a healthcare for example hipaa is a very important regulation you want to follow so you want all you want someone you can tap in from the risk and compliance department when this happens the second one is finance it is very important the way we change the finance model from capital expenditure into operational expenditure in the cloud so you want someone who understands that and also understands how do we want to charge these charge pack these charges into individual lines of business or individual projects so you want someone who does understands clouds capabilities and also has that and again this is an advisory role may not be present for each and every cloud center of excellence meeting but definitely available so that you can go and tap them on any finance questions that you have the third one is legal this is kind of important in the sense you if you have any contract that is specific sla stuff you would want someone from your legal again available as an advisory role so you can go and get their opinion when you are forming these contracts and finally you want operations and administration where when you want when something goes wrong you want to have a clear-cut communication plan on who will be communicated who will be talking to your cloud provider and how are you going to escalate the tickets and stuff like that again having that clear-cut communication plan is very important and again that is that is part of your advisory role and even driven automation is as well very important and we are seeing a lot of customers go to event driven architectures recently is when an incident happens rather than having manual tasks we can actually automate all of that and again part of your operations and administration so if you look at it you have a core service core roles and you also have advisory roles again by no means these are the only limited roles but you get a picture of what we are trying to get to here so you have this entire team available and which helps you make these decisions more strategic on what the direction of your cloud journey should look like so let's now talk about how cloud center of excellence is tied up with your business that is again very important stuff so we have two sides of things let's first talk about cloud engineering the cloud engineering has three components under it the infrastructure operations and security so all these all this will have cloud engineering cloud center of excellence which will help with the cloud engineering adoption of the cloud on the business side is where you will have cloud business office which will have governance enterprise architecture which will also have training enablement of your resources and which will also have some kind of finance and then you will have the business application services which will basically tie your cloud engineering to your cloud business office if you now look at the overall picture now you get how your cloud applications will be deployed and cloud center of excellence is pretty much everywhere throughout this process both helping cloud engineering as well as cloud business office and as you can see there is representation from both the business office as well as cloud engineering in your cloud center of excellence so it is very important that you focus on having representation both from the business side as well as your engineering side in your cloud center of excellence so you make decisions which are which are best in the best interest of your organization and your cloud journey so now let's talk about what are the initial functions now i have found my first team i have my cloud center of excellence team that i have what should they do going forward so let's talk about how cloud center of excellence evolves and what are some of their functionalities the initial functions of your cloud center of excellence again have to the horizontal and vertical roles right so let's talk about them for a second horizontally initially cloud center of excellence will help your teams hand in hand all your it operations and business team hand in hand with some methodologies like agile methodology agile development devops and also infrastructure as code as you are going into the cloud you want everything to be written as code rather than having instances and servers so cloud center of excellence will help you with that on take on driving the methodology and also going through infrastructure as code and horizontally it will also help you with with migrating to the best practices that you're supposed to vertically you are going to have some best practices some vendor management so if we want to select a vendor within the cloud how do you do that and it also will help you with cost optimization chargebacks how do you do that with tagging and different methodologies that are available and also it will help you with some cataloging where all the resources will be having some catalog they can dive into rather than having the having entire cloud open to the entire organization so cloud center of excellence can do all the evaluations and come up with a catalog saying hey these are the ones that i want to open for my entire organization so if you look at it you have some vertical functions and some horizontal functions as well so this is how your cloud center of excellence will start off with having that hand in hand with your teams but as we said that is how we start off but as time progresses we strongly recommend cloud center of excellence team members to rotate on a regular basis the whole idea there is take the individuals who got the experience who understands the best practices and go back to these individual teams and you have new members in your team so they can learn the idea here if you look at this we are talking about the horizontals are no more available in your medium term because the individual teams are capable of their methodologies like the agile devops and infrastructure as a code it is well established by your medium term going to long term which is 8 to 12 months out we are talking about cloud center of excellence more in an advisory role helping you evaluate newer technology because more and more people have been in your organization have been got have been already trained with cloud center of excellence in some part of their journey they are already understand what what are the best practices so there is no real need for your cloud center of excellence to do hand-in-hand training so as you can see you progressed from when you started you progressed from an area where you were helping them hand in hand with all small workloads to an advisory role about in two years helping your teams be self-sufficient with their capabilities especially in the cloud so this is an amazing cloud journey as you are as you are maturing your cloud journey your cloud center of excellence as well matures so let's talk about couple of examples on how it would be impacted with your pre-cloud center of excellence and post cloud centre of excellence so let's talk about the scenario which normally happens during during the year where you have a development team and they have this new ai service and they definitely want to try out this new ai service so let's see how it would be in a pre cloud center of excellence solution so again we are assuming it is on on premises right so there are multiple teams involved and multiple teams to get the work done all the way from networking you need someone from security you need someone from business some too many teams involved and getting approvals from each individual team again takes a lot of time and now you're talking about months for from your idea inception to going into the market and it may be needed sometimes you might get new hardware if you are on premises but if you are in the cloud you might have new instances new servers that you need to come up with and when you look at the overall cost this is a very extremely highly costly application but moving into cloud center of excellence what happens is you have this one team the cloud center of excellence already approved this so the one team that's cloud center of excellence needs to approve it for you and now you're talking about time to market in days because everything is approved there are no additional approvals that are required if you have a new service you can just try it out if not you can tie things together and try out and again it's as simple as pay as you go you try out if it works out you invest in this if it does not work out you kind of shut it down and just pay for the resources you used and document your learnings and move on the second example i have i have here is business wants to develop a new application to react to something that is happening in the industry so in this case again you have multiple teams involved you have the again the speed of market is is months and you want to integrate this with your existing application if everything is successful so you want to do a poc but if it does not work out you don't want any interaction with your existing applications and as part of the poc as well you do not really want to interact with the existing application you want the integration to be you are doing it more like a test kind of environment with with something like cloud center of excellence you still might need multiple teams because in this case you have business you have a business giving your requirements you have the development teams but again cloud center of excellence will help you the number of approvals might be less and you cloud center of excellence will help you with getting a sandbox up very quickly to just test this poc out so they can help you with all the specifications that you need and they also can help you with what to check in case uh what what is the criteria of the poc for it to be successful stuff like that and if you have again any aws services that are new you can actually work it on and if it is successful you actually can integrate it back into your existing cloud environment very easily just by merging both of these accounts if it does not you can shut down the sandbox and move on again very important to understand the difference here is developing this new application if you have anything directly available like an amplify of aws it would be very easy for us to adapt to those newer technologies because it's already evaluated in the same scenario you don't have to worry about any compliance needs because cloud center of excellence already evaluated it and said hey this is all compliant with what we want to do so those are the two examples that we normally see in real world so now let me give you some good next steps to see how we can move on the first thing is you want to identify that core leadership and who are the key stakeholders of your cloud center of excellence you want to move on and educate this cloud centre of excellence team members because as i described the role of a cloud center of excellence team member is very different from their day-to-day responsibilities so you want to help them educate on what their role is and how are they going to influence it then you want to identify and mobilize some of these what is the foundational resources that they are going to do what what is that foundation that they are going to build you want to identify that then identify any workloads that are going to be building on that foundation or as part of the foundational framework finally we want you to commit and launch your cloud center of excellence right committing and launching involves a couple of things having a date on which you want to have your first cloud center of excellence meetings and also on a regular basis make sure you have a cadence on which your cloud center of excellence meets and also document all the decisions they have made right so it is very important to have it all documented so you can learn from what are the previous decisions and if you already evaluated something you don't want to do redo that right so these are some of the next steps i think would be a great step for you guys to take it from here and also we have some really amazing blogs that we have published on a strategy blog which talks about some of the best practices and we also have cloud adoption framework which helps you adopt into a cloud in general it talks about six pillars that are extremely important on your adoption and we also have cloud business office that i talked about we have a good amount of blocks around that and apart from that i also have some architectural resources which talk about what are the well architected frameworks for you to get a good understanding on how cloud center of excellence reference architectures would be we have a solutions library where you can go and actually look at some of our reference architectures which are following well architectured architected patterns and which are already published you can go and get a look of it and get a feel about it on how to how to take that and implement in your organization so again there are a lot of resources out there on aws that you can use to get get along so that's all i had today thanks for taking time for attending this again my name is mahesh guram and this is my email v-e-n-g-u-r-r at amazon.com feel free to let me know if you have any questions more than happy to help you guys in your cloud journey and please take time to fill the survey and let us know what we did so that we can improve on our next sessions

2021-02-09 12:02

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