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Stream/Area:
-
Subject:
-
Paper ID:
IJSREM17382
Volume:
7 |
1 |
Jan 2023
Pages:
1-8
Publication Frequency:
Monthly (12 issues per year)
License:International Journal of Scientific Research in Engineering and Management follows the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) License, allowing free use and distribution with proper attribution.
Independent Researcher
Independent Researcher
Most enterprise cloud estates are not designed. They accrete. A first workload is deployed under deadline pressure, a second one copies the first, and within a year the organization is operating a production environment whose identity model, network layout, and cost boundaries were never deliberately chosen. Retrofitting a foundation onto a running estate is one of the most expensive and disruptive projects an infrastructure team can undertake. This article presents the Cloud Foundation Framework, a layered model for establishing the non-negotiable substrate of an enterprise cloud environment before the first production workload is deployed. The framework organizes foundation work into six dependent layers: tenancy and governance, account topology, identity, network, guardrails, and observability. It argues that the order of construction matters as much as the components themselves. Drawing on foundations I have built for regulated and large-scale enterprises across AWS and Azure, I describe each layer, the failure modes that appear when it is skipped, a pragmatic definition of a minimum viable foundation, and a small set of measurable signals that indicate whether a foundation is actually working. The intent is not a product-specific runbook but a durable mental model that survives changes in tooling and cloud provider.
KEYWORDS
Cloud foundations are not glamorous. They produce no feature, win no customer, and appear in no demo. Their entire value is negative: the incidents that never happen, the audits that pass without drama, the migrations that are never needed because the thing was built correctly the first time. That invisibility is exactly why they are skipped, and why skipping them is so reliably expensive. The Cloud Foundation Framework is an argument for spending a small, bounded amount of deliberate effort at the one moment when a foundation is cheap to build, which is before the estate fills up. Its six layers (tenancy, accounts, identity, network, guardrails, and observability) are ordered by dependency, built bottom-up, and present from the start even in their thinnest form. None of the individual practices is novel, and competent architects have used all of them. What the framework offers is the discipline of sequence and the insistence that the substrate be chosen rather than inherited. In a decade of being called in to repair estates that grew without one, I have never regretted building a foundation first, and I have never seen an organization that skipped it avoid paying for the omission. The bill usually arrives at the worst possible time, and always at many times the original cost.
Amazon Web Services, "AWS Well-Architected Framework," AWS Whitepaper, 2020. Microsoft, "Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure," Microsoft documentation, 2020. S. Rose, O. Borchert, S. Mitchell, and S. Connelly, "Zero Trust Architecture," NIST Special Publication 800-207, National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2020. P. Mell and T. Grance, "The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing," NIST Special Publication 800-145, 2011. B. Beyer, C. Jones, J. Petoff, and N. R. Murphy, Eds., Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, 2016. N. Forsgren, J. Humble, and G. Kim, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps. Portland, OR: IT Revolution Press, 2018. J. Humble and D. Farley, Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2010.
Publication Date
1/25/2023
Peer Review Type
Double-Blind Peer Review
Review Rounds: 2
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Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest related to this research work.
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