Establishing Your Cloud Foundation on AWS

Publication date: September 13, 2023 (Document revisions)

Abstract

The increasing breadth and depth of cloud services makes the cloud a powerful enabler of efficiency, agility, and rapid innovation. However, building a foundational AWS Cloud environment requires decisions across multiple AWS and partner products, services, and solutions. Customers are looking for guidance to help them set up and operate an environment that is compatible with their IT practices, and enables their builders and operators while adhering to governance requirements.

This whitepaper introduces a guided path approach to help customers build and evolve their AWS Cloud environment based on a consolidated set of definitions, scenarios, guidance, and automations. The approach includes people, process, and technology considerations of establishing an AWS Cloud environment.

Introduction

The primary business drivers behind moving to the cloud include greater agility, innovation, and scale. When planning a cloud adoption strategy, the number of decisions that you need to make to stand up a production-ready cloud environment is significant. Decisions that are made early on can affect your ability to enhance and/or scale your environment in the future. This complexity has led customers to look for prescriptive guidance across the range of AWS services that can be used to create a foundational environment.

Establishing a cloud foundation on AWS requires guidance tailored to your business needs. Using a capability-based approach, you can create an environment to deploy, operate, and govern your workloads. You can also enhance the capabilities to extend your environment as your requirements evolve and you deploy additional workloads to the cloud.

Building a foundational environment on AWS can be done with a standard, prescriptive set of capabilities across different functional areas. These capabilities can be used as a structured way to quickly build or expand your AWS Cloud environment, and include scenarios and corresponding guidance.

You can adopt and implement capabilities according to your operational and governance needs. As your business requirements mature, the capability-based approach can be used as a mechanism to verify that your cloud environment is ready to support your workloads and scale as needed. This approach enables you to confidently establish your cloud environment for your builders and your business.