AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)
Guidance from Amazon Web Services for planning an organisation’s move to the cloud. Where the AWS Well-Architected Framework reviews a workload’s architecture, CAF addresses the organisation around it — capabilities, people and process — and is used to analyse and assess readiness for migration.
Key points
- CAF organises adoption into six perspectives, each owned by different stakeholders:
- Business — align cloud investment with business outcomes; the source of the business-perspective capabilities.
- People — culture evolution, roles, skills, cloud fluency and change management.
- Governance — benefits management, program and portfolio management, and risk management.
- Platform — the target architecture and the platform engineering to get there, including data engineering and CI/CD.
- Security — incident response and infrastructure protection, carried into the account structure, plus identity and access management at scale.
- Operations — running and supporting the workloads once migrated, including configuration management and patch management.
- Transformation phases — Envision (demonstrate how the cloud accelerates business outcomes), Align (identify capability gaps and stakeholder alignment), Launch (deliver pilots in production), Scale (expand to the full portfolio).
- The output of a CAF assessment is a list of capability gaps, which is why it pairs with a cost baseline: use AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate the target-state spend and compare it against current on-premises total cost of ownership, as described in AWS Pricing and Billing.
- For the execution itself, AWS Professional Services and AWS Managed Services (AMS) are the AWS-side delivery options, and AWS Application Discovery Service gathers the on-premises inventory that feeds the plan.