Well-Architected Framework (WAF) & Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)

Azure’s Well-Architected Framework targets a specific workload and provides guidance at the workload level. The Cloud Adoption Framework is really focused at the portfolio level. Organizations new to cloud will begin with Azure’s Cloud Adoption Framework.

CAF ensures the platform, processes, and people are delivering a well-managed operating model across the portfolio. WAF goes deep on each application (or at minimum the most important ones) to validate architectural decisions at the workload level.

The five pillars of Well-Architected Framework are:

Cost Optimization – Managing costs to maximize the value delivered
Reliability – Ability of a system to recover from failures and continue to function
Operational Excellence – Operations processes that keep a system running in production
Performance Efficiency – Ability of a system to adapt to changes in load
Security – Protecting applications and data from threats

The Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure is organized around seven pillars:

Strategy – Define business justification and expected outcomes of adoption
Plan – Align actionable adoption plans to business outcomes
Ready – Prepare the cloud environment for the planned changes
Adopt (Migrate/Innovate) – Migrate and modernize existing workloads / Develop new cloud-native or hybrid solutions
Govern – Govern the environment and workloads
Manage – Operations management for cloud and hybrid solutions
Organize – Align the teams and roles supporting your organization’s cloud adoption efforts

The Well-Architected Framework picks up the conversation were CAF leaves off, ensuring that each application team is developing and operating well-architected workloads.

Together, CAF & WAF ensure your entire enterprise is well-architected and well-managed throughout your cloud adoption journey.

The Microsoft Assessment portal currently provides 5 useful tools to help you achieve Microsoft’s best practices for Azure:

The Azure Enablement show on Channel9 is a series of technical conversations with a community of Microsoft experts, addressing common questions and challenges in your cloud adoption journey. The show introduces two series aligned to key resources that support your cloud journey—the Cloud Adoption Framework and the Azure Well-Architected Framework.

AWS launched its Well-Architected Framework in 2015. It helps customers review workloads against architectural best practices, and across pillars such as sustainability, operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization [PDF; 88 pages].

AWS CAF [PDF; 35 pages] groups its capabilities in six perspectives: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations. Each perspective comprises a set of capabilities that functionally related stakeholders own or manage in your cloud transformation journey.

AWS CAF 3.0's six groups of foundational perspectives (Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations) and 47 discrete capabilities

Google launched their cloud architecture framework in May 2020.

The Google Cloud Architecture Framework provides recommendations and describes best practices to help architects, developers, administrators, and other cloud practitioners design and operate a cloud topology that's secure, efficient, resilient, high-performing, and cost-effective.

The Google Cloud Adoption Framework [PDF; 35 pages] helps customers identify key activities and objectives that will reliably accelerate their cloud journey.

The Cloud Maturity Assessment provides a structured approach for using the Google Cloud Adoption Framework to assess your organization’s readiness for the cloud and what you can do to fill in the gaps and develop new competencies.

Oracle also offers a Best practices framework for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure & Cloud Adoption Framework.