The table below describes recommended conventions for creating Google Cloud element names for the example.com reference architecture. We highly recommend evaluating both “Reliability standards and practices” and “Tiers of service” as early in the SRE process as possible, but that may be feasible only after you’ve established your first SRE team. There have been instances of a single SRE team adopting characteristics of multiple implementations other than adopting tiers of service. For instance, a single Kitchen Sink SRE team could also have two SRE consultants playing a dual role. An SRE team may also act as a “reliability standards and practices” group for an entire company.

Google Workspace and Cloud Identity customers have access to additional features of the Google Cloud resource hierarchy, such as organization and folder resources. Project resources at the top of their hierarchy do not have parent resources, but they can be migrated into an organization resource once it has been created for the domain. For more details about migrating project resources, see Migrating project resources. The Infrastructure Engineering team is responsible for making the process of getting a deployable artifact to production and managing it as painless as possible for product teams.

Also, you can grant roles at the organization level, which are inherited by all project and folder resource under the organization resource. In some organizations, the Infrastructure Engineering team may own and operate infrastructure services, such as common compute clusters, databases, or message queues. In others, they might simply provide opinionated guard rails around these things. Without this, it’s easy to end up with every team running their own unique messaging system, database, cache, or other piece of infrastructure.

Replies to “Structuring a Cloud Infrastructure Organization”

For example, you can allow access from the public IP address range of your corporate network. After you create the access context, youcreate a Google Group in Cloud Identity and add users to that group who have context-aware access restrictions.You thencreate an access binding between the access level and the Google group. You can use the Organization Policy Service to apply policies to a Google Cloud organization. The organization policies are inherited by all child resources of the resource node to which the policy is set, unless an explicit override is set on a child resource. Organization policy constraints in the example.com reference architecture are defined in Terraform modules and deployed through the deployment pipeline.

We’ve also observed software development to be an effective tool for balancing these approaches. Once they see the benefits that they can achieve by using that system, development teams are influenced to adopt the practices through the provided tooling. As adoption of such a system grows, the approach can then shift to target improvements for SREs and set mandates through reliability-related conformance tests. It isn’t sufficient to simply provision a VM quickly — even if it’s a fully featured VM that’s ready for production use immediately. Fortunately, virtualization and encapsulation make it much easier to instrument, analyze and control each layer of infrastructure so they can be continually tuned for more efficient operation. Cloud providers can position themselves as the trusted advisors that can help customers overcome these barriers and develop a more progressive IT organizational structure.

But why should providers care about helping customers build private clouds when there’s money to be made in public cloud services? The ultimate goal for many enterprises is to interconnect public and private clouds via cloud connectors to create hybrid clouds that are more scalable, elastic and cost-efficient than private clouds alone. In fact, according to Gartner, 70% of enterprises will be pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy by 2015.

Take Control of Your Multi-Cloud Environment

VMware allows enterprises to create application modernization and multi-cloud strategies that support cloud operations across a multi-cloud landscape, including both hybrid cloud and public cloud native architectures. Enterprises can architect the multi-cloud environment that best match their applications, with the flexibility to build, deploy, and manage from the data center to the cloud to the edge. The organization resource represents an organization and is the root node in the Google Cloud resource hierarchy when present. The organization resource is the hierarchical ancestor of folder and project resources.

• Folder structure is dependent on the nature of the organization and the type of workload being deployed.
• If you are new to Google Cloud and have not created a project yet, the organization resource will be created for you when you log in to the Google Cloud console and accept the terms and conditions.
• Virtual Desktops Remote work solutions for desktops and applications (VDI & DaaS).
• Financial Services Computing, data management, and analytics tools for financial services.
• As this staggered approach increasingly blurs the lines between application development and infrastructure, organizations can more nearly approach the operating model of “hyperscalers” .
• Keep in mind that your implementations of SRE can be different—this is not an exhaustive list.
• More often than not, the cultural transformation is more arduous than the technology transformation.

The model above can hopefully act as a framework to help you identify needs and areas of ownership within your own organization. Keep in mind that these areas of responsibility might shift over time as capabilities are implemented and added. When thinking about organization structure, I find that it helps to consider layers of operational concern while mapping the ownership of those concerns. Some areas may have overlap, and responsibilities may also shift over time. This is mostly an exercise to identify key organizational needs and concerns.

Google Cloud resource hierarchy in detail

This signoff is related to, but not the same, as documenting your team charter . Consulting SRE teams may write code and configuration in order to build and maintain tools for themselves or for their developer counterparts. If they are performing the latter, one could argue that they are acting as a hybrid of consulting and tools implementations.

More often than not, the cultural transformation is more arduous than the technology transformation.

In other words, while such an SRE team may not interact with every service or developer team directly, it’s often the team that establishes what’s acceptable elsewhere within their area of expertise. The self-service cloud and ITaaS requires customers to adopt a more vertically oriented IT organizational structure in which a single team can easily administer and monitor the entire stack. Sam Elmalak is a WW Tech Leader at AWS and a member of the AWS security community.

Infrastructure is about enabling product teams, and Reliability is about providing a first line of defense when it comes to triaging production incidents. This latter subgroup is, in and of itself, its own post and worthy of a separate discussion, so we’ll set that aside for another day. We are really focused on what a cloud infrastructure organization might look like. Assured Workloads is enabled at the folder level, and you can create additional folders and projects under that folder .

Benefits of the organization resource

This OU is for AWS accounts of individual technologists, in which they can learn and dive deep into AWS services. It is recommended that accounts within this Sandbox devops organization structure are detached from the customer’s internal networks. Access to the internet is required to access AWS services, but it is recommended that this be limited.

SRE tends to act as a glue between disparate dev teams, creating solutions out of distinct pieces of software. This describes an SRE team where the scope of services or workflows covered is usually unbounded. It’s often the first SRE team in existence, and may grow organically, as it did when Google SRE first got started.

Types of Organizational Hierarchies

Each team folder could contain additional sub-folders to represent different applications. For more details about using folder resources, seeCreating and managing folder resources. All users, including free trial users, free tier users, and Google Workspace and Cloud Identity customers, can create project resources. Users of the Google Cloud Free Program can only create project resources and service resources within projects. Project resources can be the top of their hierarchy, but only if created by a free trial user or free tier user.

Before you begin implementing SRE

These projects, detailed in the table below, provide various enterprise functions and are created through the infrastructure deployment pipeline. The resource hierarchy consists of folders, projects, and resources, and it defines the shape and use of Google Cloud services within an organization. Policies are inherited, and these policies can’t be altered by resource owners who are lower in the hierarchy.

Best practices for setting up your multi-account AWS environment

Day 2 Operations for GKE Tools and guidance for effective GKE management and monitoring. DevOps Best Practices Processes and resources for implementing DevOps in your org. Modernize Software Delivery Software supply chain best practices – innerloop productivity, CI/CD and S3C. CAMP Program that uses DORA to improve your software delivery capabilities. Government Data storage, AI, and analytics solutions for government agencies.

Database Migration Service Serverless, minimal downtime migrations to the cloud. Cloud Spanner Cloud-native relational database with unlimited scale and 99.999% availability. Google Cloud Deploy Fully managed continuous delivery to Google Kubernetes Engine and Cloud Run. Cloud Code IDE support to write, run, and debug Kubernetes applications. VMware Engine Fully managed, native VMware Cloud Foundation software stack. Cloud SQL Relational database service for MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server.