Next steps - AWS Prescriptive Guidance

Next steps

If you are in the process of modernizing your operations, use this guide and the associated patterns to start your journey. When considering a large-scale migration to the cloud, many organizations invest significant time and resources in planning and assessment, but it may be helpful to start with a targeted application to use as minimal viable product. You'll find it faster and more valuable to establish the foundation services, and then use the technical foundations, business learnings, and deployment processes developed in that project as the basis for larger-scale activities.

Modernizing operations is an iterative process. It evolves over time as you integrate other operations tooling with your cloud initiatives. As the following diagram illustrates, the process includes alignment, launch (cycle 1), scaling, and optimization.

Iterative approach to modernizing operations

  • Align. In this phase, you conduct discovery activities to agree on the desired business outcome, educate the team, address blockers, and align technical and business stakeholders on the initiative. This is part of operational readiness and discovery described earlier in this guide.

  • Launch (cycle 1). In this phase, you launch something small but fully functional into a production-like environment. The goal is to deliver minimum viable product (MVP) capabilities. For example, you can migrate an existing workload or create new functionality.

  • Scale. In this phase, you expand the limited-scope work from the launch phase and expand it to full scale. For innovation, this means rolling out all functionality to all users. For migration, this means migrating all workloads to AWS.

  • Optimize. In this phase, you revisit workloads in AWS to identify areas for improvement and implement them. It’s during this phase that you might consider AIOps, for example.

The process of modernizing operations in the cloud involves readiness, automation, and integration. This guide described how to achieve readiness by defining a cloud operating model, how to automate your operations using AWS services, and how to integrate your tools using best practices. It also showed you how to use a migration project with a targeted application to start the process of modernizing operations.