Management for Azure environments #

Design area overview #

For stable, ongoing operations in the cloud, a management baseline is required to provide visibility, operations compliance, and protect and recover capabilities.

The management design area focuses on the considerations and recommendations for landing zone design decisions. Also, the Manage methodology of the Cloud Adoption Framework provides further in-depth guidance for holistic management processes and tools.

Operations baseline #

• Inventory & visibility: As cloud environments are implemented and scaled out, management controls that span the environment become increasingly important. No matter the services that are running on top of the landing zone, the management of fundamental elements of the platform is necessary to ensure stable, ongoing operations. These management tools should scale as the environments do. They can include a mix of first-party and third-party tools, depending on your existing investments.
• Operational Compliance: Requirements for patching and managing configuration drift. Requirements for automatic or centralize resource optimization and sizing. Requirements for workloads that should only be optimized or resized by the assigned workload teams. Processes for ensuring completion of their regular optimization efforts.
• Protect & Recover: Your organization needs to design suitable, platform-level capabilities that application workloads can depend on for a basic level of business continuity and disaster recovery. Specifically, these application workloads have requirements related to recover time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). Be sure that you capture disaster recovery (DR) requirements to identify and address needs for advanced operations.

Platform Management #

When evaluating supported workloads, it’s common for those workloads to have dependencies on shared platforms, like SAP, Azure Virtual Desktop, AVS, SQL, and so on. When technology platforms are used by multiple workloads, advanced operations can’t be delegated to a single workload team. In these instances, centralized operations teams need a plan for the ongoing operations of those shared technology platforms. These responsibilities require extra tooling beyond the operations baseline that supports the overall cloud environment.

Workload management #

Workloads built on top of the landing zone platform might have specific management requirements in addition to the tools and processes put in place for the platform services. These requirements should be considered in the context of the platform management to ensure that additions or exceptions are known and documented. It’s also important to look at these requirements in the broader context. Often, what is thought to be a requirement for a single workload can become a common pattern. Consider these situations as part of the overall platform toolset to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort. For further information on considerations for workload-specific management, review the operational excellence of the Azure Well-Architected Framework.