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Plan for Azure high-performance computing (HPC)

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Cloud Adoption Framework's Plan methodology helps create an overall cloud adoption plan to guide the programs and teams involved in your cloud-based digital transformation. This guidance provides templates for creating your backlog and plans for building necessary skills across your teams, all based on what you are trying to do in the cloud. This article outlines how to include HPC into the overall cloud adoption plan.

Application of the Plan methodology focuses on the five Rs of rationalizing your digital estate. The most common path to the cloud focuses on speed, efficiency, and repeatability of the migration and modernization processes. From the five Rs, planning usually prioritizes rehost options with limited parallel support for rearchitect and rebuild options.

HPC estate

While it's important to gather inventory data for a digital estate for cloud adoption, it's recommended to assess your current environment's HPC usage. Digital estate measurements can change depending on the desired business outcomes.

Evaluate the attributes of your HPC environment in terms of an asset-driven approach when planning your digital estate.

HPC adoption plan

When planning cloud adoption for your HPC environment, review the Azure DevOps strategy and plan template to align your tasks and organize objectives through epics, features, and user stories.

Also plan your HPC network topology to follow best practices surrounding networking and connectivity for Azure HPC deployments.

For skilling your IT teams on adopting Azure HPC services, identify gaps when forming your digital transformation.

Once your team gaps have been identified, the next steps are further developing HPC skills with Microsoft learn.

HPC readiness plan

While identifying gaps is important to adopting Azure HPC services, it's also crucial to build a readiness plan as IT staff members will likely have role changes and have concerns to new job duties in the adoption efforts. Role changes might include datacenter technicians replaced with cloud administrators or even new cloud architects to oversee the HPC cloud deployments.

There's also the possibility that the IT job titles won't change. Instead, the daily work of these roles has changed such from managing and maintaining physical infrastructure to expanding into virtualization specialization through cloud platforms such as Azure. As the duties change, there will be a different set of skills to support cloud solutions.

Capturing these cloud skilling concerns might involve executive leadership to help drive the relevant training needed to support expanding functions. It's also necessary to document your IT staff concerns when noting resistance to change, as well as the impact if resistance concerns aren't addressed. It's also important in addressing reluctance on acquiring new IT skills to support the expanded functions and new duties.

Next steps

  • After planning your HPC environment for cloud adoption, understand the governance decisions made by your cloud platform team.
  • Review governance recommendations when designing your governance landing zone.