Ready your Azure cloud operations

This article helps you establish and maintain effective operations for managing your Azure cloud estate. Successful cloud operations require clearly defined responsibilities and processes for every cloud management area.

Identify your management responsibilities

Effectively managing your Azure environment involves central (platform-wide) responsibilities and workload responsibilities. Central responsibilities support your entire Azure cloud estate. Workload responsibilities focus on an individual workload. Use Table 1 to ensure your operations account for essential cloud operations responsibilities.

Table 1. Primary cloud management responsibilities

Establish your cloud operations

Use the responsibilities outlined in Table 1 to build an effective operational foundation. Clearly define teams, standards, and processes by following these steps:

1. Define your cloud operations model. Choose a centralized or shared management model based on your organization's size and maturity, outlined in the following table:

   Operations approach	Responsibilities and scope	Best for	Pros	Cons
   Centralized	A single team manages all tasks.	Startups or small cloud footprint.	Simplifies cloud management.	Risks creating bottlenecks.
   Shared management	Separate central (platform) and workload teams	Organizations with diverse workloads.	Balances governance and agility.	Requires clear assignment of responsibility

2. Establish central responsibilities. Form a dedicated team to handle central management tasks. Develop a skills matrix from Table 1 to identify required expertise.

3. Establish workload responsibilities. Set up specialized teams for workload-specific tasks. Identify responsibilities using Table 1 then recruit accordingly.

   • Conduct an Azure Well-Architected Review. Use the Well-Architected Assessment tool to reassess each workload while developing and testing design changes.

   • Use the Azure Well-Architected Framework. Use the Operational excellence pillar to guide your workload management responsibilities.

4. Assign responsibility. Name specific owners for all cloud management responsibilities. In a shared management model, workload teams should have autonomy to manage their subscriptions.

Document your cloud operations

Clearly document your cloud operations to enable efficient crisis response and smooth implementation of changes. Establish overarching procedures and create detailed guides for frequent and specific tasks.

Document operational procedures

Define operational procedures for managing change, disaster recovery, and routine maintenance tasks that automation can't handle. Follow these steps:

1. Define change management procedures. Change is the major cause of failure in the cloud. Develop a standardized process for managing changes to avoid failures in your cloud environment. See Manage change.

2. Define deployment procedures (release management). To maintain consistent configuration, standardize your deployments, releases, and environment promotions. See Manage deployments.

3. Define disaster recovery and business continuity procedures. To handle potential failures, prepare a standardized response plan. See Manage disaster recovery and business continuity.

4. Define additional procedures. Document processes for managing service requests, patching, and configuration management. Clearly document these processes to ensure stakeholders know how to initiate or complete each task.

Document operational guides

Create detailed step-by-step guides (runbooks or playbooks) for key operational tasks. This preparation ensures consistent execution, improves efficiency, and shortens resolution times during critical events.

1. Define daily tasks. Prepare manuals covering daily responsibilities, such as privilege escalation requests and log reviews. Establish standard operating procedures (SOPs) for monitoring metrics, alert thresholds, and dashboards for each system.

2. Create a library of Azure-centric runbooks. Create Azure-specific runbooks addressing scenarios such as:

   Scenario	Example
   High CPU usage	Azure App Service
   Failover and failback	Azure Site Recovery
   Blue/green deployments	Azure Front Door
   Backup restoration	Azure Blob Storage and Azure Cosmos DB

3. Store these runbooks in a central repository. Maintain runbooks in a central repository accessible by on-call engineers for immediate use during incidents.

4. Implement operations programmatically. Integrate infrastructure-as-code into your runbooks to deploy common resources consistently and accurately each time.

5. Review and update. Periodically review and revise documentation to reflect operational adjustments and cloud service updates.

Document tools and solutions

Adopt standardized tools and processes for cloud operations throughout your organization. Ensure teams use Azure Monitor, ticketing system, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates, and deployment pipelines (GitHub Actions or Azure Pipelines). This approach promotes consistency, reduces redundancy, and enhances cross-team support capabilities.

Manage your cloud operations

Standardize tools, automate routine tasks, and align support coverage to simplify daily cloud operations. Clear processes minimize confusion and accelerate incident resolution. Ensure teams adopt unified monitoring, ticketing, and Infrastructure-as-Code practices. Follow these operational guidelines:

Manage cloud support

Provide continuous support for critical incidents by establishing 24/7 coverage. Meet service level agreements with clearly assigned responsibilities. Implement either a follow-the-sun model across global teams or maintain a structured on-call schedule. Configure alerts to notify the on-call engineer or team whenever an alert triggers.

Manage repetitive work

Automate repetitive operational tasks to eliminate manual errors and reduce operational burden. Use Azure services for handling routine work, allowing your team to focus on strategic tasks.

Improve operations

Optimize your Azure cloud environment by promoting continuous improvement. Regularly evaluate operations and prioritize ongoing learning and feedback. Follow these steps:

1. Review operations to improve. Follow best practices to monitor the health, compliance, security, costs, data, and cloud resources. Conduct weekly operational reviews to discuss key metrics, recent incidents, deployed changes, and anticipated risks. Actively address resource sprawl and technical debt.

2. Train for operations. Foster ongoing skill development by prioritizing essential learning resources. Maintain dynamic cloud operations through practical training environments.

   Operations training	Description
   Get credentials	Set goals for Microsoft credentials, like applied skills and Microsoft Certifications to build expertise.
   Use operational resources	See Azure management resources.
   Use product documentation	Use Microsoft Learn to find guidance on Azure services.
   Get hands-on practice	Encourage hands-on practice in nonproduction sandbox environments.

Azure management resources

Next steps