In contrast, successful organizations combine those goals with a healthy mix of team-level goals channeled from the bottom up. A frontline infrastructure engineer often has the best understanding of resiliency issues that could bring down operations. An SRE model incorporates aspects of software engineering, such as capacity planning, and applies them to infrastructure problems. The goal of this model is to enable scalability and improve the reliability of software systems. There will still be maintenance, compliance audits, optimization, resource deployment, data integration, and more critical tasks to be done on a regular basis. To keep up with everything, you are going to need to institute and standardize processes for continued cloud management from your team.

This approach makes the most sense when the application teams are able and willing to define and maintain SLOs. Mandates rely on organizational structure, processes, and hierarchy to drive adoption of reliability standards and practices. In the end, the bank successfully rolled out a new mobile-only banking offering in its target geography at unprecedented speed.

More often than not, the cultural transformation is more arduous than the technology transformation. With many VMware ESXi servers reaching end of life, users must decide to extend existing support agreements, upgrade to version 7… Hyperscale data centers can hold thousands of servers and process much more data than an enterprise facility. More so, these countries have thriving tech hubs and their professionals are proficient in global languages such as English, making them suitable to hire remote developers. For example, Ukraine is a popular destination for IT project outsourcing, due to the abundance of affordable talents to hire. Rather countries like Ukraine, India, Mexico, China, etc. have a lower cost of living, which in turn reduces the cost of hiring professionals.

Not to mention, there are a lot of operational concerns that many developers are likely not even aware of—the sort of unsung, unglamorous bits of running software. A cloud security specialist sometimes oversees the architected infrastructure and software under development and ensure cloud accounts, resources, services and applications meet security standards. Security specialists also review activity logs, look for vulnerabilities, drive incident post-mortems and deliver recommendations for security improvements. With years of experience and extensive knowledge of the IT industry, ProCoders has developed a unique staff augmentation approach to building a successful cloud migration team and migrating data to the virtual platform. Prior, we have identified some of the major positions to be filled as you embark on building your cloud migration team. You want a team that can handle all the challenges involved in moving your operation to virtual storage.

Digging into infrastructure challenges

A mandated approach may be effective in an organization where strict processes are already expected and common in other areas, but is highly unlikely to succeed in an organization where individuals are given high levels of autonomy. These teams tend to focus on behind-the-scenes efforts that help make other teams’ jobs faster and easier. Common implementations include maintaining shared services or maintaining common components (like CI/CD, monitoring, IAM or VPC configurations) built on top of a public cloud provider like Google Cloud Platform . This is different from SREs working on services related to products—i.e., customer-facing code written in house. Teams need access to granular and recent metrics on reliability , response time , and cost .

To get the right engineering talent on board, the bank first looked internally and found that 80 percent of its engineers could be reskilled and moved into different or new roles. This sensitivity to culture and prioritization of internal talent also helped the bank get its teams on board with the transformation. Shifting to an engineering-focused organization and gaining the support of advanced engineers also made it possible to adopt an SRE model. One banking institution found that for every dollar it invested in engineering public and private cloud, it was investing $2.50 in operations.

Get organizational buy-in

Next, assign roles and responsibilities to each cloud operations team member depending on their individual skill sets and experience, avoiding overlapping duties and covering all areas of cloud operation. Finally, the CloudOps team must be equipped with the right collaboration and communication tools for the project to run as smoothly and efficiently as possible. A cloud operations team needs a highly respected person in a senior position in the business who is also tech-savvy to oversee the cloud migration project, provide guidance for cloud administrators, and communicate with all stakeholders. Cloud operations are the tasks and processes that maintain cloud-based (including multi-cloud and hybrid) applications, workloads, and services, including the management of their implementation, performance, and optimization. Regardless of which SRE team model defines the scope of the team, any SRE team also has a decision to make about the depth of their engagement with the software and services within their area. This is particularly true when there are more development teams, applications, or infrastructure than can be fully supported by the SRE team.

One of the low-level concerns this group is responsible for is AMI and base container image maintenance. This might be the AMIs used for Kubernetes nodes and the base images used by application pods running in the cluster. These are critical components as they directly relate to the organization’s security and compliance posture. They are also pieces most developers in a large organization are not well-equipped to—or interested in—dealing with.

Benefits and drawbacks of CloudOps

To get this level of insight, teams need CFO support and access to tools that can track financial and nonfinancial targets. Then teams can tie targets to specific tasks and product features to understand their performance and how they add value. The cloud compliance specialist helps develop privacy policies and processes. This person works with the security manager to ensure that the organization is in compliance with industry privacy and security standards and requirements.

• This person works with the security manager to ensure that the organization is in compliance with industry privacy and security standards and requirements.
• Many internal-infrastructure teams maintain an array of server configurations and deploy capacity on a make-to-order basis, with little inventory held in stock and no room for rapid deployment.
• Enterprises are using a Cloud Center of Excellence to bring key stakeholders together, develop a centralized cloud strategy, and define best practices for decentralized execution.
• Instead of infrastructure teams seeing themselves as traditional IT organizations, they need to function like strategic partners to their companies.

The model above can hopefully act as a framework to help you identify needs and areas of ownership within your own organization. Keep in mind that these areas of responsibility might shift over time as capabilities are implemented and added. I should also caveat that—outside of being a strategic instrument—Real Kinetic is not in the business of simply helping companies lift-and-shift to the cloud. When we do, it’s always with the intention of modernizing and adapting to more cloud-native architectures. Consequently, our clients are not usually looking to merely replicate their current org structure in the cloud. During Explore, VMware tried to convince customers to use its technology for building a multi-cloud architecture.

Who belongs on your all-star cloud team

In general, however, the most effective SREs maintain a balance of responsibilities between engineering and operations, with a greater than 50 percent emphasis on engineering. Four operating-model changes can help companies accelerate the journey to cloud. In this article, we will discuss each of these roles to help you successfully run your business in the cloud. When thinking about organization structure, I find that it helps to consider layers of operational concern while mapping the ownership of those concerns.

This latter subgroup is, in and of itself, its own post and worthy of a separate discussion, so we’ll set that aside for another day. We are really focused on what a cloud infrastructure organization might look like. While teams are typically tailored to meet a project’s specific technical and business needs, there are eight key cloud team roles and responsibilities commonly found in a cloud team structure. The migration project steps are different, and setting up a cloud migration team structure involves more than just hiring people. Unlike hiring freelancers who are unreliable, hiring a cloud migration team helps you to secure your business model for unique market delivery. Cloud migration is a complex process that requires expert knowledge in cloud infrastructure, security and networking, as well as business analytics and process optimization skills.

Cloud architect

Contact us today for further information about our cloud engineering services and more. This implementation is very similar to the embedded implementation devops organization structure described above. The difference is that consulting SRE teams tend to avoid changing customer code and configuration of the services in scope.

Roles and responsibilities on DevOps teams

Company-wide support helps make your migration to the cloud is a success and provides resources to continue to improve your cloud architecture post-migration. Your executive sponsor plays an essential role in communicating a holistic cloud strategy. Migrating to the cloud and keeping it running smoothly is not the time to “wing it.” You need to find the right people with the right skills, and you need to assign them to the right roles. But there’s nothing wrong with looking at outside resources to build your dream team. Lastly, do not mistake this framework as something that might preclude exploration, learning, and innovation on the part of development teams. Again, opinionation and standards are not binding but rather act as a path of least resistance to facilitate efficiency.

They also need to have an in-depth knowledge of CloudOps processes and stay up-to-date with trends and innovations in cloud technology. When embarking on a cloud migration project, building and structuring the cloud operations team is critical to success. The team’s roles and responsibilities will vary depending on the size and scope of the project, but there are some key functions that every cloud operations team should have. Setting objectives and key results at the outset of the transformation helps application development and infrastructure teams align on what they want to achieve with their new, agile, automated IT infrastructure. Historically, most organizations either focus on tracking activities or have different OKRs for different teams, which is why many miss out on potential value.

By capturing demand signals, such as revenue estimates for new and existing markets, and employing predictive machine-learning-enabled engines, infrastructure teams can adjust workload requirements with greater precision and speed. The first pillar, abstraction, decouples management from the underlying infrastructure so cloud machine instances, storage instances, security, network and governance can be managed through a single pane of glass. This centralized approach to management allows an administrator to use a single tool such as Apigee, for example, to manage applications and services running in the cloud. Every organization will define and structure a CCoE a bit differently – there are no hard and fast rules. In fact, companies may call it by a different name, such as a Cloud Business Office or Cloud Program Office. In any case, CloudHealth recommends that cloud operations be one of the three pillars of your CCoE, alongside cloud financial management, and cloud security and compliance.

The work relationship between the embedded SRE and developers tends to be project- or time-bounded. During embedded engagements, the SREs are usually very hands-on, performing work like changing code and configuration of the services in scope. Allows product developers to use DevOps practices to maintain user-facing products without divergence in practice across the business. Setting these goals also helped the bank avoid the common pitfall of starting a transformation without focus, which can result in operating-model changes that increase IT complexity. Counterintuitively, setting high goals helped bank employees feel freer to test, learn, and think creatively to achieve their targets. Goals should be hard enough to promote outside-the-box thinking and present a challenge.

If a team consistently meets every goal, more likely than not, the goals were not hard enough to start with. Setting stretch goals and targets gets teams excited about transformation and can create a culture of collaboration. Metrics must be detailed enough to be traced back to a team, tracked quarterly, and attributed to a business outcome so that executives can see where they need more coverage or support.