What's new in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure

Here's a list of recent changes made to the Cloud Adoption Framework.

This framework is built collaboratively with customers, partners, and internal Microsoft teams. New and updated content is released when it becomes available. These releases allow you to test, validate, and refine the guidance along with us. We encourage you to partner with us to build the Cloud Adoption Framework.

October 2021

Microsoft Azure VMware Solution scenario

This release of the Cloud Adoption Framework provides considerations for migrating VMware resources from on-premises datacenters to dedicated Azure cloud environments.

This scenario focuses on enabling specific, targeted outcomes to:

• Accelerate migration and lower your TCO, reducing the time and complexity of migrating your existing VMware workloads to Azure—and maintain operational consistency, avoiding downtime with live bulk virtual machine migration.

• Gain reliability and scale with automated provisioning for your VMware workloads on global Azure infrastructure.

• Optimize your licensing costs on Azure with price benefits for Windows and SQL Server.

• Modernize your applications running on VMware—through integration with Azure-native management, security, and services.

• Deploy unified hybrid management and operational controls with Azure Arc-enabled servers across Azure, VMware, and other cloud infrastructures.

August 2021

Data management and analytics scenario

This release of the Cloud Adoption Framework provides considerations to help you prepare for data management and analytics in the cloud.

This scenario focuses on enabling a few targeted outcomes:

• Mature your analytics, AI and machine learning, and IoT capabilities in the cloud.
• Establish appropriate data governance across all data initiatives to move forward with confidence.
• Minimize technical debt by considering well-architected principles across all data workloads.
• Automate all three of the above with the codebase for enterprise-scale for analytics.
• Quickly access skilling resources in documentation or learning modules for the various Azure services required across this scenario.

Get started with this scenario using the following links:

Strategic Migration Assessment and Readiness Tool (SMART)

We've added an article to help you use the Strategic Migration Assessment and Readiness Tool (SMART). This assessment can help you find out what you need to do to prepare for your Azure migration.

July 2021

This release of the Cloud Adoption Framework includes updates to the Azure landing zone content in the Ready methodology.

• What is a landing zone? now includes a conceptual architecture and Azure landing zone accelerator, intended to help customers plan their cloud environments and begin best practice implementation quickly and easily.
• Journey to the target architecture includes new content that helps organizations determine which guidance is best suited to their current position on their cloud journey.
• Updated the Azure landing zone design areas to help distinguish between considerations for implementation and considerations for operating a landing zone

June 2021

We've added a new retail industry scenario in this release, designed to guide a retail company's cloud adoption journey from beginning to end.

May 2021

Cloud Adoption Framework Secure methodology

This release of the Cloud Adoption Framework introduces the new Secure methodology, which will centralize the theme of security best practices and provide end-to-end guidance for customers looking to adopt Microsoft guidance for their cloud environments. Security concerns have surged to the forefront of many top priorities lists recently, building on feedback requesting a more security-centric view, the Secure methodology will assist in defining the security aspect of the cloud journey.

Azure Virtual Desktop adoption journey

As part of the ongoing series of adoption journeys, this release includes expanded guidance for integrating Azure Virtual Desktop (formerly Windows Virtual Desktop) into your cloud adoption journey. This rich guidance shows how each methodology in the Cloud Adoption Framework helps provide structure and best practices to your implementation approach.

Cloud economics updates

This release continues the refresh of the Strategy methodology by integrating Microsoft's cloud economics program.

We've added new content that includes the financial and technical considerations to keep in mind as you develop your business case.

• Financial considerations
• Technical considerations
• Build a digital transformation timeline
• Create a business case
• Share your strategy

Modern application platform

We expanded and revised the modern application platform content in this release. Commonly, customers need to provide their developers with a consistent application platform. This article series outlines how you can use orchestrated containers to manage pools of workloads in one or more centralized clusters, thus providing that consistent application platform. The articles in this series for modern application platform combine technical and non-technical considerations required to prepare for Kubernetes and container integration into centralized operations and your broader cloud strategy.

April 2021

Cloud service controls

To help you implement cloud governance at a pace that sustains a high level of innovation, and implements the right level of control for your environment, we've added a new article, Implement cloud service controls. It focuses on a proven process to help governance teams implement granular controls across the Azure platform, while accelerating the development capabilities for cloud adoption teams. The process can be implemented by enterprises of any size, at any stage of their cloud journey. This guidance outlines the different stages of the process, from taking the enterprise requirements for cloud control for security, operations, and cost management, through the stages of development and release of controls.

Azure Storage migration overview

To help you plan your Azure Storage migration, we've provided guidance in a new article, Azure Storage migration overview, for two migration scenarios:

• Migration of unstructured data, such as files and objects.
• Migration of block-based devices, such as disks and storage area networks.

March 2021

This release is the largest update of the framework yet, adding a number of new broad-reaching collections of guidance that span across the entire framework.

Adoption journeys

Most notable in this release is the addition of adoption journeys, which provide a short, consumable overlay or lenses that rest on top of the deeper framework to accelerate engagement. These shorter guides demonstrate how to apply the guidance in the Cloud Adoption Framework, the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework, the Azure Architecture Center, Microsoft Learn, and other Microsoft documentation to the adoption of specific technology platforms. The following table provides links to the overview page for each of the new journeys:

Cloud economics

Building on feedback and lessons learned, this is our first step to refresh the Strategy methodology by integrating Microsoft's cloud economics program.

We've updated the introduction to each category of business outcomes with references to case studies on cloud economics, demonstrating how organizations achieve the related business objective. The refreshed introductions with illustrative case studies include:

• Fiscal outcomes
• Agility outcomes
• Global reach outcomes
• Customer engagement outcomes
• Performance outcomes
• Sustainability goals

Enterprise-scale updates

The critical design area of network topology and connectivity includes new articles that simplify rationalizing individual components of your network design. Those design aspects now include guidance on connecting to multicloud providers like Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. We've also released the new enterprise-scale Terraform module to demonstrate Microsoft's continued investment in open-source approaches to Azure landing zone configuration. Lastly, we've updated guidance on how enterprises can optimize management groups and organize subscriptions in Azure to meet cloud governance requirements.

Antipatterns

Companies often miss important steps in their cloud adoption journey. The new cloud adoption antipatterns guidance highlights common customer pain points, what skipped step led to that pain, and the fastest path to recovery. The antipatterns are distributed throughout each methodology, but a top 10 list is available in the getting started section of the framework.

AI + machine learning

When planning an Azure Machine Learning deployment for an enterprise environment, there are common decision points that affect how you create the workspaces. We've published a new article, Organize and set up Azure Machine Learning environments, that highlights these decision areas and the benefits of each:

• Team structure: How your machine learning teams are organized and collaborate on a project's given use case and data segregation, or cost management requirements.
• Environments: The environments used as part of your development and release workflow to segregate development from production.
• Region: The location of your data and the intended audience for your machine learning solution.

We added a reference implementation example to help illustrate the deployment of Azure Machine Learning in a larger setting. It outlines how the organization 'Contoso' set up Azure Machine Learning given their organizational constraints, reporting, and budgeting requirements.

January 2021

To help you accelerate adoption and innovation, we've added new information about using GitHub and updated best practices for machine learning. We've published a new article and video to help you choose the best landing zone.

December 2020

We've revised the naming and tagging strategy guidance, as well as adding guidance for Moodle migration scenarios.

October 2020

This month's updates include incremental improvements throughout the Cloud Adoption Framework and supporting web assets.

Our biggest investments have focused on building out Microsoft Learn modules to accelerate application of the Cloud Adoption Framework. This month, we released the modules listed below. Note that the Getting Started module provides our first guidance aligned with an industry vertical, by introducing a retail customer (Tailwind Traders) who we will follow through all of the core methodology modules to follow.

We've also expanded the business outcomes to share a number of common business motivations and approaches that continue to emerge in the post-COVID marketplace.

August 25, 2020

This release provides better definition and decision criteria regarding landing zone implementations.

Operating model

One of the most important considerations in landing zone design and implementation is your operating model. How you want to operate in the cloud will have a direct impact on the architecture and controls to implement. The following articles will help align your target operating model with a few models that are common in the cloud. Then map those to the most appropriate implementation to get started.

Azure landing zones: Additional implementation options

The concept and implementations options behind Azure landing zones was built alongside the leading Microsoft partners. This release recognizes the existing intellectual property (IP) that those partners use to accelerate cloud adoption.

July 17, 2020

This release adds a number of new scenarios to make cloud adoption more actionable.

Migration scenarios:

The new migration scenarios overview page builds on the Migrate methodology to demonstrate how Azure delivers on the One Migrate promise. It provides approaches to migrating multiple first and third-party scenarios to Azure. This includes new migration scenarios:

Analytics in the Cloud Adoption Framework:

Analytics solutions are now included in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework. These new topics highlight best practices for enabling analytics solutions during your cloud adoption journey.

AI in the Cloud Adoption Framework:

AI solutions and best practices are now integrated into the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework. These AI solutions can help accelerate innovation with predictions about customer's needs, automate business processes, discover information, find new ways to engage with customers, and deliver better experiences during your cloud adoption journey.