Introduction
Millions of customers, including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and
leading government organizations, use AWS. (See Customer Success Stories
The organizational ability to effectively use the cloud to digitally transform (organizational cloud readiness) is bolstered by a set of foundational capabilities. A capability is an organizational ability to use processes to deploy resources (people, technology, and any other tangible or intangible assets) to achieve a particular outcome. The AWS CAF identifies these capabilities and provides prescriptive guidance that thousands of organizations around the world have successfully used to improve their cloud readiness and accelerate their cloud transformation journeys.
AWS CAF groups its capabilities in six perspectives:
The Platform perspective focuses on accelerating the delivery of your cloud workloads with an enterprise-grade, scalable, hybrid cloud environment. This environment comprises seven capabilities shown in the following diagram. These capabilities are managed by stakeholders who are functionally related in their cloud transformation journey. Typical stakeholders include the chief technology officer (CTO), technology leaders, architects, and engineers.
These capabilities are discussed in detail in the following sections of this guide. Each section provides guidelines on how to start, advance, and ultimately excel in a particular capability.
The Platform perspective is a pivotal piece of the AWS CAF. It is the nexus in which the decisions made across all other perspectives converge to provide business agility and value. The decisions made here help or hinder your business objectives at a foundational level. The AWS CAF Platform perspective facilitates the creation of an enterprise-grade, scalable, cloud environment that underpins your organization's transformation. Through this perspective, the AWS CAF guides you in establishing a robust platform that can enable your cloud journey, ultimately leading to significant business transformation and growth.
As you work through the Platform perspective, take into account the cross-functional connections with business leaders that need to be developed, and the value they bring to your teams and organization. Place additional focus on operating model changes and team topologies to ensure that requirements are met. In addition, look to develop the skills your teams require to build the platform and enable its usage across application teams. Keep in mind the people, business, governance, security, and operational objectives of your organization as you make these decisions―these are pivotal in ensuring the adoption of the platform and the success of your efforts.
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