Foundation Service Platform
Offer cloud infrastructure services managed by the cloud foundation team from a self-service platform.🚧 This capability reference page is a draft.
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Cloud is a way to deliver IT that maximizes business outcomes. Where classical IT services meant opening tickets or writing emails to 10 different stakeholders, the cloud is about having a single interface for application teams to get everything they need to be productive. A cloud foundation service portal is a crucial part of getting away from a classical IT service operating model.
🌤️ Most cloud foundation teams implementing a foundation service platform integrate it with Self-Service Multi-Cloud Tenant Database into a single solution.
A Cloud Foundation service platform typically supersedes Individual Service Provisioning capabilities established earlier in the cloud journey.
Best Practices for a Cloud Foundation Service Platform
Make Platform Services Easily Discoverable
Making the complete service portfolio offered by the cloud foundation team as easily discoverable as possible, makes it more likely that customers can choose the best solution for the job. Ideally, teams only needs access to the platform service portal to explore the options available to them.
Integrate Core Infrastructure Services
Application teams moving to the cloud in a “hybrid” setting need internal services like IPAM, SSL certs, internal DNS etc. By offering these services from a central Cloud Foundation service portal, organizations can avoid the need to maintain separate systems of record like CMDBs. Instead, the cloud foundation team can maintain all cloud-related infrastructure inside a single solution, effectively creating an internal cloud control plane. Application teams can manage all their infrastructure from a single plane of glass and don’t need to fragment their resources across cloud-native and legacy ITSM systems.
Enable Modular Landing Zones
A cloud foundation service portal is a natural companion to a Modular Landing Zones approach. Integrating tenant management and landing zone configuration capabilities with a cloud foundation service portal
Leverage a Consistent Service Provisioning Workflow
Most services that cloud foundation teams offer to their teams need to tightly integrate with the chosen landing zone design. Those integrations necessarily are platform-specific like
Virtual Network Service needs to create Azure VNETs, GCP VPCs, ...
Managed DevOps Toolchain needs to integrate permissions on cloud tenants via an Azure Service Principal, GCP Service Account, ...
Integrating those services for multiple platforms necessarily means implementing platform-specific code. However, reusing a common service provisioning workflow across implementations can greatly enhance productivity.
For the two example services above, these parts could be modularized and shared across cloud platforms:
Virtual Network Service needs to reserve an IP range in an IPAM.
Managed DevOps Toolchain needs to manage e.g. a CI/CD pipeline and grant access to user.
A cloud foundation service portal can provide a consistent interface to services for provisioning and parameterization while tooling like terraform enables a consistent implementation workflow.
Related Tools
Currently no tool implementations documented. Contributions welcome!
