A cloud operating model is essential for organizations to succeed with cloud adoption and thrive in multi-cloud environments. This white paper explains the components of that approach and the key role of centralized platform teams in industrializing application delivery. It focuses on proven patterns for standardizing how people work, the processes they follow, and the tools they consume.
Platform teams include engineers who provision, run, and manage cloud infrastructure and other shared services. They create and operate highly automated platforms available on-demand across the organization. Developers can access the platform capabilities via self-service processes, making it easy to quickly create new environments and new service instances. The platform team’s responsibility is to keep the platform stable, resilient, performant, and secure. Critically, bolstered by a reliable baseline of services from the platform team, application development teams across the organization can create and release new capabilities to users more quickly.
Over time, high-performing platform teams use feedback from developers, security engineers, and business leaders to refine processes, improve reliability, and add desirable new features.