AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) six perspectives explained
The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) groups its foundational capabilities into six perspectives: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security and Operations. Each perspective is a set of capabilities owned by a related group of stakeholders. The first three are mostly business-facing and the last three mostly technical.
What AWS CAF is for
AWS CAF gives best-practice guidance to improve cloud readiness, which AWS defines as your ability to use the cloud effectively to transform your business digitally.
A capability is an organization's ability to use processes to deploy resources, such as people and technology, to reach an outcome. AWS CAF groups these capabilities into the six perspectives.
Business, People and Governance
Business: helps ensure your cloud investments accelerate your digital transformation ambitions and business outcomes. Common stakeholders are the CEO, CFO, COO, CIO and CTO.
People: bridges technology and business, with a focus on culture, organizational structure, leadership and workforce. It helps the organization move to a culture of continuous growth and learning.
Governance: helps you orchestrate cloud initiatives while maximizing organizational benefits and minimizing transformation-related risks. Common stakeholders include the chief transformation officer, CFO, chief data officer and chief risk officer.
Platform, Security and Operations
Platform: helps you build an enterprise-grade, scalable, hybrid cloud platform, modernize existing workloads and implement new cloud-native solutions. Common stakeholders are the CTO, technology leaders, architects and engineers.
Security: helps you achieve the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your data and cloud workloads. Common stakeholders include the CISO, the chief compliance officer and internal audit leaders.
Operations: helps ensure your cloud services are delivered at a level that meets the needs of your business. Common stakeholders include infrastructure and operations leaders, site reliability engineers and IT service managers.
Where the exam catches people
- Believing the Governance perspective is about security controls: Governance orchestrates cloud initiatives and minimizes transformation risk; confidentiality, integrity and availability belong to Security.
- Believing the Operations perspective builds the cloud platform: building the platform and modernizing workloads is the Platform perspective; Operations keeps services at the level the business needs.
- Believing the People perspective is about access management: it covers culture, organizational structure, leadership and workforce.
- Believing AWS CAF perspectives are the same as Well-Architected pillars: perspectives group organizational capabilities for adopting the cloud; pillars group best practices for a workload's architecture.