Remove Roadblocks and Speed Up Delivery with Reference Architectures
Growth in cloud adoption has grown steadily over the last several years and was recently given a boost with so much of the workforce working remotely due to Covid-19 restrictions. It’s estimated that in 2020 alone, 83% of enterprise workloads will have been moved to the cloud. For organizations to truly reap the maximum benefit of the Azure cloud investment, having the right modern governance framework and processes in place is crucial to success.
A key component of a modern governance model is reference architecture. You can think of reference architecture as a templated solution for architecture in a particular domain. Adopting reference architecture within an organization accelerates delivery through the re-use of effective solutions and provides a basis for governance to ensure the consistency and applicability of technology use within an organization.
Basic Components of Reference Architecture
In general, you will want to have the following artifacts included in your reference architecture:
- Architectural Diagram – this is a visual diagram of the components of the architecture and their interdependencies.
- Deployment templates – these are the Azure Resource Manager templates that are used to automatically deploy the components of the architecture in Microsoft Azure. It is important to parameterize where possible to design these templates to be reusable.
- Automated Deployment Scripts – any scripts need to validate and orchestrate the deployment of the complete reference architecture.
- Documentation Wiki – this contains any documentation needed for the reference architecture as well as a change log to document revisions over time.
Automated Provisioning
Combining Azure ARM templates and the release orchestration capabilities of Azure DevOps is a win-win for your organization. With this powerful combination, innovation teams can quickly provision new environments and domain specific architectures that are based entirely on your organization’s governance and architectural standards and performed in a consistent and repeatable manner.
Summary
If you are ready to accelerate your organization’s governance transformation, contact InCycle to schedule an introductory call. Together, we can explore how we can help you achieve your goals. To learn more about cloud governance, download our Azure Governance Playbook.
Reference links: https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/cloud-adoption-statistics/
