Separated AEO and IEO with centralized governance and an internal service provider consulting partner
This “Separated AEO and IEO” model seeks to establish a “you build it you run it” methodology.
You want your application teams to perform the engineering and operations activities for their workloads, and to adopt a more DevOps like culture.
Your application teams may be in-progress migrating, adopting the cloud, or modernizing your workloads, and not have the existing skills to adequately support cloud and cloud operations. This lack of application team capabilities or familiarity may be barriers to your efforts.
To address this concern you establish a Cloud Center of Enablement team (CCoE) that provides a forum to ask questions, discuss needs, and identify solutions. Depending on the needs of your organization, the CCoE can be a dedicated team of experts or a virtual team with participants selected from across your organization. The CCoE provides cloud transformation for teams, establishes centralized cloud governance, and defines account and organization management standards. They also identify successful reference architectures and patterns for enterprise use.
We refer to CCoE as Cloud Center of Enablement, instead of the more common Cloud Center of Excellence, to place the emphasis on creating the success of the supported teams and the achievement of business outcomes.
Your platform engineering team builds the core shared platform capabilities based on those standards for application teams to adopt. They codify the enterprise reference architectures and patterns that are provided to the application teams through a self-service mechanism. Using a service such as AWS Service Catalog the application teams can deploy approved reference architectures, patterns, services, and configurations, compliant by default with the centralized governance and security standards.
The platform engineering team also provides a standardized set of services (for example, development tools, monitoring tools, backup and recovery tools, and network) to the application teams.
Your organization has an “Internal MSP and Consulting Partner” that manages and supports the standardized services and provides assistance to application teams establishing their cloud presence based on the reference architectures and patterns. This “Cloud Operations and Platform Enablement (COPE)” team works with the applications teams to help them establish baseline operations with the application teams progressively taking more responsibility for their systems and resources over time. The COPE team drives continual improvement together with the CCoE and Platform Engineering teams, and acts as proponents for the application teams.
The application teams get assistance setting up environments, CICD pipelines, change management, observability and monitoring, and establishing incident and event management processes with the COPE team integrated with those of the enterprise as required. The COPE team participates with the application teams in the performance of these operations activities, phasing out the COPE team engagement over time as the application teams take ownership.
The application team gains the benefit of the skills of the COPE team and the lessons learned by the organization. They are protected by the guardrails established through centralized governance. The application team builds upon recognized successes and gain the benefit of continuing development of the organizational standards they have adopted. They gain greater insight to the operation of their workload through the process of establishing observability and monitoring, and are better able to understand the impact of changes they make to their workloads.
The COPE team retains the access necessary to support operations activities, provide an enterprise-operations view spanning application teams, and to provide critical incident management support. The COPE team retains responsibility for activities considered undifferentiated heavy lifting, which they satisfy through standard solutions supportable at scale. They also continue to manage well-understood programmatic and automated operations activities for the application teams so that they can focus on differentiating their applications.
You gain the advantage of your organization’s standards, best practices, processes, and expertise derived from the successes of your teams. You establish a mechanism to replicate these successful patterns for new teams adopting or modernizing on the cloud. This model places emphasis on the COPE team’s ability to help application team get established, and transition knowledge and artifacts. It reduces the operational burdens of the application teams with the risk that application teams will fail to become largely independent. It establishes relationships between CCoE, COPE, and application teams creating a feedback loop to support further evolution and innovation.
Establishing your CCoE and COPE teams, while defining organization wide standards, can facilitate cloud adoption and support modernization efforts. By providing the additional supports of a COPE team acting as consultants and partners to your application teams you can remove barriers that slow application team adoption of beneficial cloud capabilities.
