AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)
The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) leverages AWS experience and best practices to help you digitally transform and accelerate your business outcomes through innovative use of the cloud. It helps you identify and prioritize transformation opportunities, evaluate and improve your cloud readiness, and iteratively evolve your roadmap.
The 6 Perspectives (Pillars)
The CAF organizes guidance into six areas of focus, called Perspectives. These are split into Business and Technical capabilities.
Business Capabilities
- Business Perspective: Ensures that cloud investments align with your business goals and outcomes (e.g., Strategy, Innovation, Product Management).
- People Perspective: Focuses on organizational culture, skills, and change management (e.g., Workforce Transformation, Organization Design).
- Governance Perspective: Focuses on orchestrating cloud initiatives and minimizing risk (e.g., Program Management, Risk Management).
Technical Capabilities
- Platform Perspective: Focuses on the architecture and design of your cloud environment (e.g., Architecture, Provisioning).
- Security Perspective: Ensures the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data and workloads (e.g., IAM, Threat Detection).
- Operations Perspective: Focuses on the daily health and performance of your cloud services (e.g., Observability, Event Management).
The 4 Phases
- Envision: Identify and prioritize transformation opportunities in line with strategic business objectives.
- Align: Identify capability gaps and cross-organizational dependencies.
- Launch: Deliver pilot initiatives in production and demonstrate incremental business value.
- Scale: Expand pilot initiatives to the desired scale and realize business benefits.
Exam Tips
[!TIP] Mnemonic: "Big People Govern Platforms Securely in Operations."
[!IMPORTANT] Perspectives vs Pillars:
- Do not confuse CAF Perspectives (Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, Operations) with the Well-Architected Framework Pillars (Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, Sustainability).
- If the question mentions "organizational culture," "skills," or "training," the answer is likely the People Perspective.
- If the question mentions "minimizing risk" or "project management," it's the Governance Perspective.
- If the question mentions "business value" or "ROI," it's the Business Perspective.