You should consider operational readiness when you prepare to move business-critical applications and production workloads to the public cloud. Following checklist will help you determine your readiness.
While considering your environment, you can also review resources such as architecture frameworks and associated whitepapers to ensure that you follow deployment best-practices. There are also third-party cloud management platforms that can provide enhanced checks.
You should define and test your continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to make sure they work as designed. This step ensures that the environments remain in a consistent state because deviations can cause entropy, which almost certainly introduces service impacting events.
Ensure that all your resources meet your companies tagging strategy. This practice helps you to manage these environments in the future.
Ensure that you identify and document all internal and external stakeholders' names for a workload with relevant contact details.
You should back up or configure replication for all business-critical data. Make sure you test these processes and confirm that they are consistent with the solution recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) goals.
Document your approach to all solutions so you can apply system updates per the organization’s vulnerability assessment program. Don’t forget to consider potential penetration testing or other security and vulnerability scans of the infrastructure.
You should configure, enable, and test end-to-end service monitoring to ensure that monitoring notifications work as expected. Ensure that the teams who need to use the playbooks help to define them and understand them.
Configure and enable an appropriate level of logging for all services. Validate that you enabled a suitable level of verbosity and that you capture adequate data. Also, consider the log retention periods.
Now that you have built the solution and it’s ready to go live, validate that the costs are consistent with the forecasted costs to ensure that these services remain commercially viable.
If you defined disaster recovery and business continuity plans during the solution design phase, test and validate them. Consider the RPO and RTO.