Customer narrative
We shared the narrative for Tailwind Traders in the Getting Started module and other Learn modules for the Cloud Adoption Framework. There are two key activities specific to this module about planning for cloud adoption. The central operations and infrastructure team is preparing to migrate several workloads to the cloud. The CTO and the development team are also building new innovations using data, IoT on the edge, and mobile applications.
Plan for Tailwind Traders' migration effort
In this module, you'll build out a plan for the Tailwind Traders' migration effort. The following is an excerpt of the current state environment that will be migrated.
Tailwind Traders currently have three datacenters. One is located within the same office building where the employees work; the company owns this building and datacenter. The two other datacenters are in separate locations and are leased from datacenter providers. All three datacenters are a mix of physical and virtual servers. The virtualization platforms that the company uses are a mix between Hyper-V and VMware. This mix is the result of different people with different strategy ideas leading the IT department over the years.
Tailwind Traders' servers primarily run Windows Server, with a mix of Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2016. The company has only a few instances of Windows Server 2019. Upgrading the operating systems to the latest version or following a consistent strategy was a priority for the organization despite various IT team members trying to push that goal.
There are a few Linux and other open-source servers. The IT operations team isn't familiar with the servers, because the development team introduced them without collaboration between the teams.
The leases for the two datacenters are due to run out in 18 months and two years. The IT manager and finance director have been talking, and they don't want to renew the leases. Instead, they're considering a project that will upgrade, consolidate, and use the cloud as a replacement datacenter. The new CIO is using this project as an opportunity to rethink IT operations.
Plan for Tailwind Traders' new innovation effort
Additionally, the retail innovation team will update its continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to deploy new solutions to the cloud. You use the same migration-assessment tools to overcome some documentation challenges among the innovation team's past efforts. You'll also use migration tools to test the compatibility of those solutions with essential Azure services. The inventory of data structures, applications, and other services helps to validate the team's DevOps deployments.
Build the cloud-adoption plans
To keep all the cloud-adoption efforts on track, the Tailwind Traders CIO and project managers create a set of cloud-adoption plans to manage various activities and share progress across the organization.
The exercises in this module's remaining units walk through each step of translating the current adoption strategy and future efforts into an actionable cloud-adoption plan. You'll use the following steps:
- Confirm prerequisites: Confirm that all prerequisite steps have been completed before you create your plan.
- Define and prioritize workloads: Prioritize your first 10 workloads to establish an initial adoption backlog.
- Align assets to workloads: Identify which assets (proposed or existing) are required to support the prioritized workloads.
- Review rationalization decisions: Review rationalization decisions to refine adoption path decisions (Migrate or Innovate).
After this module, you might also want to experiment with establishing iterations, release plans, and timelines. You can find a link to that continued learning later in this module, in the Summary unit.