The Microsoft Assessment for Cloud workloads

Where I provide a summary of tools available for customer to help in workload assessment , migration and sustained guidance for optimization.

As a practicing cloud architect one of the most important biases that I try to avoid is the curse of knowledge , also called the curse of expertise in some literature.

So what is this Curse of Knowledge that I am referring to. Well according to the all knowing Wikipedia :

The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, who is communicating with other individuals, assumes they have the background knowledge to understand.

As someone who has been in the technology field for ages and working with distributed systems, hybrid implementations of applications and cloud in general we end up ensuring we are always updated. That primarily means spending every waking hour reading and digesting new technologies, relearning the same concepts again, refreshing our knowledge and experimenting with products and services so we could articulate it to our customers and peers.

To cut a long story short I have been guilty of mentioning the Microsoft Assessment Wizards multiple times with customers during intense technical discussions and met with heads nodding in agreement , but as the conversation stretches , it does indicate to me, that may be the customer does not yet know what I am referring to. I had assumed the customer had heard of these Assessment wizards and now I have to backtrack and start over again.

The Microsoft Assessments page is the most useful resource for helping customers onboard to Azure. It helps demystify a ton of assumptions and provides a tangible roadmap for customers currently on Azure and also customers evaluating cloud platforms. It is targeted for every customer on the cloud maturity level and is an important resource for cloud architects across the spectrum.

You can look at all the assessments on the link below :

Welcome to Microsoft Assessments

The assessments are a useful tool to help customers gauge their readiness across all parameters and provide a well curated guidance depending upon the assessment chosen.

The assessments are aligned with every stage of the the customers cloud adoption strategy and also a continuous assessment once applications are deployed on cloud.

Here is a snapshot of the 7 assessments available for customers to explore:

The assessments are categorized on the following lines :

1. Azure Well-Architected Review : The most popular so far for customers who want to assess their workloads across pillars of Reliability, Cost Optimization, Operational Excellence, Performance Efficiency and Security.

2. Cloud Adoption Strategy Evaluator: A very useful tool for evaluating your cloud adoption strategy and getting recommendations for building a business case for cloud adoption.

3. The Cloud Journey Tracker : A wizard that will ask relevant questions to Identify your cloud adoption path based on your needs and navigate to relevant content in the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure. The CAF is a set of detailed prescriptive guidance to assist customers to migrate to cloud.

4. Developer Velocity Wizard: Developers are the key to any cloud migration project . Empowering developers with the latest technologies and tools is critical to the future success of your organization. This wizard will assess the readiness of your Developers in your organization by reviewing its key drivers on Technology, Working practices and Organization enablement.

5. DevOps Capability Assessment : If you want to assess your organizations development practices and understand your current capabilities across the entire software release lifecycle and identify opportunities for improvement based on the Microsoft DevOps, this wizard is a must.

6. Governance Benchmark Assessment : The most important element in achieving success in a cloud deployment project and sustaining it required good Governance control . This is even more important for regulated industries. This wizard provides a way to benchmark against industry standards and bridge the gap if any.

7. Strategic Migration Assessment and Readiness Tool: This wizard provides a guided journey to ensure your migration project is successful and you have taken in to account all dependencies to ensure adequate preparation during application migration on to Azure.

I will be covering each of this wizards in more detail in future posts. The objective of this post was to create an awareness on the tools available at a customers disposal and be aware of what is available from a assessment and enablement perspective.