Amazon’s Transition to the Cloud and the Public Cloud Portal

This blog post delves into Amazon’s journey to the cloud and the Public Cloud Portal, a platform designed for engineering teams to onboard to AWS. Amazon began this transformative journey in early 2018, marking the onset of their partnership with AWS. Here, we will explore the project that simplifies the onboarding workflow for Amazon’s engineering teams, accelerating their transition to the AWS cloud.

The primary goal of the Amazon Public Cloud Portal is to enhance the experience for teams aiming to “Build better products faster.” The portal serves as a comprehensive resource for Amazon developers to learn, onboard, and manage their products and services within the AWS cloud. This centralized interface provides the essential access to additional value that Amazon seeks in its move to AWS—such as “Accelerating time to market,” “Enhancing engineering standards and quality,” “Leveraging cutting-edge capabilities like machine learning,” and achieving “Agility through velocity and flexibility.”

Amazon has developed a superior developer experience by setting specific objectives for the Public Cloud Portal initiative:

Automate the onboarding process to allow for continuous improvement, thus reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) over time.
Clearly communicate all steps involved, manage workflows, and facilitate the onboarding process for teams.
Offer a centralized location for requesting, tracking, and comparing budgets to actual expenditures.
Develop a wizard interface that automates the AWS onboarding procedure while incorporating standards, guardrails, and best practices.
Provide tailored learning paths aligned with the chosen infrastructure architecture for deployment.
Ensure teams are onboarded to S-P-A-Q metrics collection and reporting, connecting their applications with standard metric endpoints for Speed, Performance, Availability, and Quality.
Allow Amazon engineering teams to swiftly test innovative ideas by requesting an experimental budget and account, enabling them to start building the same day.

Achieving these goals is vital for the success of Amazon’s cloud adoption, equipping engineering teams with a one-stop shop to support, coordinate, and manage their journey, including ongoing operations.

The Birth of the Public Cloud Portal

How is Amazon realizing the advantages and goals of its cloud transition, scaling across thousands of employees and hundreds of scrum teams, while enhancing the experience that accelerates engineering teams in serving their customers? Manual management of deployment standards, cloud foundation setup, onboarding information organization, tracking, and reporting is unfeasible when supporting the necessary scale and agility. This is where the Amazon Public Cloud Portal comes in, designed to offer a seamless one-stop shop for developers to learn, onboard, and manage their cloud-based products and services.

The Public Cloud Portal Ecosystem

The Public Cloud Portal acts as a comprehensive resource for development teams, providing a consistent experience for every aspect of the product lifecycle, including a managed onboarding workflow. Below is an overview of the key features and functions available in the Public Cloud Portal that support development teams:

Budget and Finance

This portal integrates budget management, allowing teams to create and manage budget requests, receive billing alerts, and monitor spending through a user-friendly widget. Key tools include the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console and the AWS Pricing Calculator. Teams are responsible for financial aspects of their projects, preparing and submitting budget requests for experimentation, dev/test, or production environments on AWS. As funding requests for production environments grow, stricter scrutiny and approval levels are mandated. Once approved, the portal transitions teams to the next stage of the onboarding workflow, providing visibility into actual spending versus approved budgets.

Accounts and Supporting Architecture Creation

An account creation wizard guides teams through standard architecture deployment choices and gathers operational information necessary for establishing the baseline account structure and AWS service configurations. Teams select a primary architectural pattern, determining which portfolios and service products they will access. The AWS Service Catalog, AWS CloudFormation, and AWS Systems Manager play crucial roles in the standardized deployment of Amazon landing zones for teams. Continuous guardrail controls are enforced with AWS Config for created AWS environments and accounts.

Teams also specify the number of Availability Zones to be established, target regions for deployment, and standard VPC/CIDR options. They provide operational information, including team roles/security levels, communication channels (such as email distribution lists and Slack), and standard monitoring/logging requirements. Once all information is submitted, background automation provisions the specified settings. Upon completion, teams receive email notifications confirming that their accounts are ready for use. They can then access the AWS interface through the GoDaddy AWS icon in OKTA, assuming standard AWS Identity and Access Management roles assigned to each account.

Cloud Readiness Review

The Cloud Readiness Review is a critical governance function, ensuring compliance with Amazon’s defined Must-Haves and Should-Do’s list, which is a more extensive version of the AWS Well-Architected framework requirements. Amazon’s criteria for development teams cover Security, Application Architecture (Reliability and Performance Efficiency), Operational Readiness (Operational Excellence), Budget/Finance (Cost Optimization), and Compliance & Privacy. Before moving to production, teams must complete the Cloud Readiness Review to certify compliance with the engineering standards outlined in the Must-Haves and Should-Do’s document. The portal serves as a centralized hub for teams to answer qualification questions, allowing reviewers to assess responses while tracking overall completion, comments, and approvals.

Process Documentation

The portal organizes all necessary process documentation for development teams. It supports teams from the initial onboarding request through live production traffic, offering a series of documented processes. The AWS Enterprise Support Infrastructure Event Management (IEM) process is optionally linked, providing robust support.

For those interested in further enhancing their understanding of financial aspects in the workplace, consider checking out this blog post for valuable insights. Also, if you want to learn more about compliance and critical considerations for the EU workforce, this resource from SHRM is an excellent authority on the topic. And for new hires preparing for their Day 1 experience, this guide is a fantastic resource.