Infrastructure Leader's Guide to Google Cloud

Making fast and accurate technology decisions is critical to staying relevant to your customers. And technology needs to add value back to your organization quicker than ever. Google Cloud offers IT leaders the answer to today’s technology challenges. However, to realize its benefits you must navigate your journey without hitting common pitfalls that lead to stalled and unsuccessful cloud adoption.

This book distills the lessons learned from guiding and working with hundreds of organizations on their journey to the cloud. Its goal is to give aspiring and current IT leaders the knowledge required to be an infrastructure leader. That is the term author Jeremy Lloyd uses for the person who can lead your organization's Google Cloud adoption strategy.

Of course, cloud adoption isn’t a solo endeavor. Jeremy covers the different generations of IT leaders, the team structure, and the skills required for a successful migration to Google Cloud. This book also covers why you should choose Google Cloud, how to build a business case for the cloud, and defining your adoption/migration/modernization strategies and cloud operating model. Finally, the book covers how to empower your developers to deploy cloud-native applications and how to support day two operations once you have moved to Google Cloud.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

* Use Google Cloud to add value to your organization
* Define and lead your Google Cloud adoption strategy
* Migrate and modernize your workloads
* Operate workloads once in Google Cloud and avoid antipatterns
* Understand how the infrastructure team can be enablers for cloud-native development

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

Current infrastructure/IT/technology leaders who need guidance for their Google Cloud adoption, migration, and modernization journey; IT managers, IT team leads and IT professionals aspiring to be the next IT leaders who must learn to navigate more than just technical complexity.

JEREMY LLOYD has over 20 years of experience in IT. He has spent the last eight years helping organizations worldwide adopt and migrate to the cloud. During this time, he’s guided and advised technology leaders from some of the world’s most well-known companies on their cloud adoption, migration and modernization strategies. In addition, he is a mentor to technology leaders and a speaker at numerous events across the UK and internationally.

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Chapter Goal: Introduce a concept that there are essentially four types of infrastructure leaders as I know them. Let them build a relationship with one of the four which provides them with a lens upon which to view the current state and the path to progress forwards with GCP. Then inform them of the role that an infrastructure leader plays in a GCP adoption and migration strategy. Lay out the challenges they will face adopting GCP/Cloud. Provide guidance on a fundamental shift from a cost centre to a profit centre.

No of pages - 12

Sub-Topics

1. What does an Infrastructure Leader do? Or Who is an Infrastructure Leader?

2. Type of Infrastructure Leaders

3. Challenges

4. Becoming a profit centre

CHAPTER 2: ABOUT GOOGLE & GOOGLE CLOUD

Chapter Goal: Take the reader on a short journey of the history of Google and bring out the narrative around their values and principles and empower them to lead innovation across every sector they touch. Then bring out the core value proposition of Google Cloud itself, underpinned by evidence to backup

No of pages - 28

Sub - Topics

1. Google short history

2. Introducing Google Cloud Platform

3. Google Cloud Platform core components

4. Why use Google Cloud Platform

CHAPTER 3: FUTURE OF IT

Chapter Goal: Orient the reader into understanding that their current state has to change. Back up the messaging with trends and data points they can’t refute.

No of pages - 3

Sub - Topics

CHAPTER 4: THE FOUR STAGES OF GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM ADOPTION

Chapter Goal: Label and define the four states of GCP/Cloud adoption. Let the reader understand how and where any experience they currently have sits. Help them understand the considerations to going with one strategy over the others.

No of pages - 7

Sub - Topics

1. Shadow IT

2. Tactical Adoption

3. Strategic Adoption4. Organisation Transformation

CHAPTER 5: BUSINESS CASE

Chapter Goal: Arm the reader with the information they need to write a rapid or detailed business case to justify adoption and migration to GCP. The aim is to make is simple for them to get the right story that will resonate with their organisation.

No of pages - 6

Sub - Topics

1. Rapid Business Case

2. Detailed Business Case

3. Integrating with an existing business case template

CHAPTER 6: THE CLOUD STRATEGY

Chapter Goal: Show them the importance of having a well-defined cloud strategy. Then give them almost a blueprint upon which to follow in how to create one.

No of pages - 10

Sub - Topics1. Version

2. Executive Summary

3. Current State

4. Financial Models

5. Alignment to business strategy

6. Guiding Principles

7. Security

8. Compliance

9. Risk Management

10. Governance

11. Ways of Working

12. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

13. Implementation Plan

CHAPTER 7: CLOUD OPERATING MODEL

Chapter Goal: With a defined cloud strategy you need the next layer which is to define what your cloud operating model is. This chapter aims to inform what to consider and how their operating model could look and how to ensure it can evolve as the organisation matures with GCP.

No of pages - 6

Sub - Topics

CHAPTER 8: MIGRATION STRATEGIES

Chapter Goal: Inform the reader of the industry used migration approaches and Google Cloud’s take on them.

No of pages - 3-5

Sub - Topics

1. Migration Objectives

2. Migration Risk management

3. Googlers & Office of the CTO4. Partner Ecosystem

5. Actions

CHAPTER 9: MODERNISATION STRATEGIES

Chapter Goal: Inform the reader about modernisation strategies, Google’s tools and some simple methods to help them quickly decide what to modernise.

No of pages - 10

Sub - Topics

1. Modernisation guardrails

2. Modernisation roadmap

3. Mainframe Modernisation

4. Migration Decision Tree

5. Actions

CHAPTER 10: ORGANISATIONAL READINESS

Chapter Goal: Provide the reader with the considerations across key areas that will help them be prepared for cloud adoption/migration.

No of pages - 34

Sub - Topics

1. Paving the roads for cultural change

2. Google Cloud Adoption Framework

3. Managing The Hype-cycle

4. Skillset

5. Cloud Adoption Teams (CMO, CCoE etc)

6. Building a Cloud Center of Excellence

7. Security Readiness

8. Governance Readiness

9. Operations Readiness

CHAPTER 11: MIGRATION & MODERNISATION TEAM STRUCTURES

Chapter Goal: Get the reader to understand the people, skills and ways of working that GCP migration and modernisation requires

No of pages - 2

Sub - Topics

CHAPTER 12: MIGRATIONS

Chapter Goal: Provide guidance across migration assessment, planning and execution. Inform them what good first mover workloads look like.

No of pages - 20-22

Sub - Topics

1. Introducing The Migration Journey

2. Assess

3. Plan

4. Migrate

5. Optimise

CHAPTER 13: CLOUD-NATIVE DEVELOPMENT

Chapter Goal: The infrastructure leader won’t be responsible for cloud-native development but they can/should play a key role in it’s facilitation. It showcases the considerations across new areas that the infrastructure team should be focusing on.

No of pages - 20

Sub - Topics

1. Cloud-Native Advantages

2. Containers

3. Integrated Development Environment

4. Serverless

5. BeyondProd

CHAPTER 14 : DAY 2 OPERATIONS

Chapter Goal: Introduce the concept of Day 2 Operations to the reader. Then give them guidance around what the infrastructure team should be thinking about across each of the sub-topics, all staying within a day 2 operations context.

No of pages - 60

Sub - Topics

1. Day 2 Cloud Challenges

2. Cloud Foundations

3. Landing Zones

4. Compute

5. Monitoring, Logging And Alerting

6. Availability

7. Reliability

8. Recoverability

9. Financial Operations

10. Performance

11. Security

12. Automation

13. Governance and Compliance

14. Cloud Marketplace

15. GCP Managed Services

16. Containers

17. Data Analytics

18. Open Source

19. Support

20. Day 2 antipatterns

21. DevOps/SRE/CRE

CHAPTER 15: PRODUCTIVITY AND COLLABORATION

Chapter Goal: Introduce a Google concept of BeyondCorp and how that ties in with a GCP migration strategy. Introduce Google Workspace and benefits of using it.

No of pages - 8

Sub - Topics

1. BeyondCorp2. Google Workspace