In two of my previous posts I discussed people and platform. In this post I’m going to share six steps to help your organization get started with platform as a service (PaaS). As with any new solution, it’s important to map out the implementation strategy. Whether your using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), PaaS, or serverless, an enterprise architect along with your cloud center of excellence provides “recommended practices.” Agree or disagree, a decoupled component design provides flexibility with scale, maintainability, support and empowers faster change while remaining stable.

At this point you might be thinking, “Is it that easy?” Not really. Like any project, planning is required. The plan should be iterative with 2-3 outcomes and with 2-6 team members. First, identify yourself: are you application development or the IT operations infrastructure persona? For example, consider this blog post that describes Microservices: Change is here today and is impacting our processes. Traditionally, these two personas do not know each other, but they should not be afraid of each other. Get to know them, and working together might look something like this:

With Azure, organizations have many choices to make, from which services to use to how to purchase, manage and govern its use. In October 2019, Microsoft announced changes to the volume licensing programs in ways that affected a customer’s ability to acquire Azure. Specifically, Microsoft:

1. Will no longer write new Azure-only Server and Cloud Enrollment (SCE) agreements
2. Will no longer renew Azure-only SCE agreements and subject any extended contracts to a 3 percent administrative fee
3. Will no longer allow Azure to be added to existing Enterprise Agreement (EA) contracts

In my last blog, 5 Disciplines of Cloud Governance for Azure, I talked about using the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) for Governance and using the five disciplines. In this blog, I will share more detail of how to implement these disciplines. The disciplines are cost management, security baseline, resource consistency, identity baseline and deployment acceleration. Each one of these disciplines can be viewed as a category of governance and used in a way to provide focus on key areas.

It is important to note that although they are separate, they do intermingle. Though it is possible to implement some governance by selecting a subset of disciplines, it is recommended to use all five disciplines as part of a governance minimum viable product (MVP) strategy.

Governance can be an overwhelming undertaking. For the organization, it can be viewed as stifling innovation; for the IT department, it is viewed as necessary to prevent out of control resources causing havoc in billing and security. These two divergent cultures must figure out a way to implement a solid governance structure for the cloud while still allowing developers and business the innovation the cloud promises. Microsoft has a solution to help bridge this conflict.

Virtual desktops, virtual desktop infrastructure, client virtualization — whatever you want to call it — is expensive and difficult to deploy and manage. Virtual desktops help solve a lot of problems when it comes to delivering applications and data to your users. However, they have not been worth the hassle and cost to justify their…

The cloud migration plan that many companies follow largely consists of a single step: migrate. They pick an application that they think they could manage more effectively in the public cloud, shift workloads to a cloud provider’s environment and then see how things go. The problem is that it’s easy to migrate resources to the…