What is a Building Block
💡 Building Blocks describe capabilities and fundamental concepts that help build a successful Cloud Foundation.
The Cloud Foundation Maturity Model assigns some common properties to every building block. These properties enables you to quickly identify what the block is about and how it relates to other building blocks in the model.
Pillar
💡 Pillars group related organizational capabilities. You can think of them as functional pillars of your cloud foundation.
Cloud Foundation teams needs to cover many different organizational aspects of cloud adoption and consumption. Pillars group related capabilities that are typically interfacing with different stakeholders inside an organizations.
🗂 Tenant Management: Manage provisioning, configuration and lifecycle of cloud environments (e.g. AWS Accounts). This is often an original responsibility of cloud foundation teams that requires internal alignment between platform specialists.
🔐 IAM: Provide Identity and Access management capabilities for all available cloud platforms and services. Needs alignment with Enterprise IAM stakeholders.
🔖 Security & Compliance: Provide capabilities for governing workloads and enforcing security guidelines across all available cloud platforms and services. Interfaces with IT Security and Compliance stakeholders.
💵 Cost Management: Provide cost management and chargeback capabilities for all available cloud platforms and services. Interfaces with Finance/Controlling stakeholders.
🛠 Service Ecosystem: Provide managed services that help teams build and operate application on the cloud faster and more efficiently (e.g. on-prem connectivity). Interfaces with internal or external teams providing these services.
Journey Stage
💡 Each Building Block has a Journey Stage. The Journey Stage is a subjective measure of how advanced a capability is for the majority of Cloud Foundations. It gives an indication at which stage of an organization’s cloud journey the capability becomes relevant.
As the individual needs of organizations vary, it's not productive to recommend a strictly ordered implementation sequence. However, Cloud Foundation teams will often find that implementing capabilities in a certain order reduces complexity and enables achieving a desired level of capabilities more easily. The journey stage in the Cloud Foundation Maturity model is therefore a guideline when teams should consider implementing a certain capability.
⭐️ Essential: Capabilities that a cloud foundation team should provide right at the start of an organization's cloud journey. Not providing these will inevitably lead to brittle processes when attempting to implement more advanced capabilities later ("building on sand" instead of building on a solid foundation).
⭐️⭐️ Recommended: Capabilities that cloud foundation teams should implement as an organization's cloud adoption accelerates. Capabilities on this journey stage allow organization’s to take full advantage of the cloud paradigm. Not implementing these capabilities should be a conscious decision as it leaves potential benefits untapped.
⭐️⭐️⭐️ Best practice: Capabilities that most cloud foundation teams implement to provide services and govern cloud landscapes of significant size. Cloud Foundation teams looking into these capabilities typically serve well over 100 internal customers.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Advanced: Capabilities on this journey stage allow Cloud Foundation teams to address the growing variety of stakeholder and customer demands as an organization's cloud adoption matures. Cloud Foundation teams should evaluate capabilities on this level for "critical mass".
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Industry leading: Capabilities that transform the Cloud Foundation team into sort of an internal cloud provider.
It's not uncommon to find cloud journeys generating demand for capabilities in different speed across functionality Pillars (see below). For example, a financial service organization might put more emphasis on advancing capabilities of the compliance Pillar.
Scope
💡 The Scope describes at which "layer" of a cloud foundation the building block needs to be implemented.
Many cloud foundation teams share the experience that the technical implementation of capabilities, is the smaller of their challenges. Creating organizational alignment about the exact requirements for a capability design and its effective implementation into the organizations existing processes is the more difficult part. In addition to Pillars, we therefore group capabilities into Scopes, indicating at which level a capability needs to be coordinated.
🏢 Core: Building blocks that are centrally enforced and across all cloud platforms.
☁️ Platform: Building blocks that need to be individually implemented for each cloud platform.
🛬 Landing Zone: Building blocks that typically require individual implementation for each landing zone (or groups of related landing zones).
Together with "Pillar" cloud foundation teams can determine the stakeholders that need to be involved in the design and implementation of a particular building block.
Implementation Maturity
💡 Each building block can be implemented in different levels of automation.
When describing and comparing implementations of the same building block, it’s often useful to categorize the degree of automation that a cloud foundation team can achieve.
Manual: Operator executes operations by hand.
Semi-Automated: Operators execute operations using a script. Execution and parameterization of the script manually.
Fully Automated: Execution and parameterization of the operation are fully automated. Operators only oversee the aggregate operation of the automation.