Microsoft's body of guidance on adopting Azure. It runs through seven stages (Strategy, Plan, Ready, Adopt, Govern, Secure, Manage), and the landing zone is what Ready delivers.
Also called CAF.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Cloud Adoption Framework in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Agents (classic) API
First-generation Foundry Agent Service API, based on threads, messages and runs. It is deprecated, replaced by conversations and responses, and retires on 31 March 2027.
- RAMP
The approach used by the Cloud Adoption Framework's Manage methodology to structure cloud operations: teams, duties, processes and tools. It divides what the central platform handles from what each workload handles.
- Govern
The part of the Cloud Adoption Framework concerned with keeping cloud use under control by setting guardrails made of policies, procedures and tools. It runs continuously across the estate alongside Secure and Manage.
- HTTP / HTTPS
The protocols of the web, with HTTPS being HTTP secured by TLS.
- MANAGE
A Unity Catalog privilege allowing a principal to grant and revoke access on an object, hand over its ownership and drop it, all without being the owner. It gives no data access by itself and is not part of
ALL PRIVILEGES.
Related terms
- Azure Naming Tool
An open-source utility that produces Azure resource names according to whatever convention you set up in it. The Cloud Adoption Framework mentions it in its guidance on naming.
- Billing offer
Whether you buy through EA, MCA or CSP. Together with the Entra tenant tied to it, the Cloud Adoption Framework sees this agreement as the top level everything in Azure lines up under.
- Brownfield
Azure resources built before, or outside, the landing zone architecture. The Cloud Adoption Framework's preferred way to bring them into line is to stand up the landing zone alongside and copy its management group, with policies set only to audit.
- CAF Ready
The Cloud Adoption Framework stage where you design and build your landing zone in Azure.
- CAF Strategy
The opening stage of the Cloud Adoption Framework. It sets out what adopting Azure should achieve by linking business goals to outcomes that can be measured.
- Cloud operating model
Who looks after cloud governance, security and operations, and how that work is split. The Cloud Adoption Framework sets out centralised, shared management and decentralised options, which are frequently combined.
- Cloud strategy team
A Cloud Adoption Framework group, made up of business and technical stakeholders, that sets out why the organisation is moving to the cloud and what it wants to achieve, then makes sure adoption stays in step with those goals.
- Decommissioned management group
A management group for landing zones that are being retired. Subscriptions placed there are cancelled; the Cloud Adoption Framework page on management groups states that Azure removes them after 30 to 60 days, while Cost Management allows 90 days from cancellation.