AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)
Learn what the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework is, the six perspectives it organizes work into, and the phases that guide an organization's move to the cloud.
- Explain the purpose of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework
- Identify the six AWS CAF perspectives and what each one covers
- Distinguish the business-focused perspectives from the technical perspectives
- Describe the four phases of a cloud transformation
Why a framework for moving to the cloud
Moving to the cloud is more than a technical project. It touches your budget, your teams, your security posture, and the way your organization makes decisions. A move that focuses only on servers and ignores skills, governance, and cost usually stalls.
The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is AWS guidance for planning and managing that move. It is not a tool you install or a service you turn on. It is a set of best practices that breaks a large, messy transformation into clear areas of work, so different teams know what they own and in what order to tackle it.
CAF helps you measure your cloud readiness, find the gaps that would slow you down, and build a plan to close them. Think of it as a checklist for the whole organization, not just the IT department.
The six AWS CAF perspectives
CAF groups its guidance into six perspectives. Each perspective is a set of related capabilities that a particular group of stakeholders owns during the move to the cloud.
| Perspective | What it covers | Typical stakeholders |
|---|---|---|
| Business | Makes sure cloud spending supports real business outcomes | CEO, CFO, CIO, CTO |
| People | Culture, skills, leadership, and workforce change | CIO, COO, HR and team leaders |
| Governance | Managing cloud initiatives, benefits, and risk | CIO, CTO, CFO, chief risk officer |
| Platform | Building a scalable cloud environment and modernizing workloads | CTO, architects, engineers |
| Security | Confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data and workloads | CISO, security architects |
| Operations | Running cloud services at the level the business needs | Operations leaders, site reliability engineers |
A simple way to remember them: think of the phrase "the People of a Business need Governance, and they run on a Platform with Security and Operations."
Business-focused versus technical perspectives
The six perspectives split into two natural groups.
Business, People, and Governance are the business-focused perspectives. They deal with strategy, culture, and oversight. These are the areas that decide whether the cloud effort has the right goals, the right skills, and the right controls behind it.
Platform, Security, and Operations are the technical perspectives. They build and run the actual cloud environment, protect it, and keep it healthy. This is the hands-on engineering side of the move.
Knowing which group a perspective belongs to is often enough to answer an exam question. If a scenario is about budgets, culture, or risk, it points to the business group. If it is about building, securing, or operating systems, it points to the technical group.
The four transformation domains
CAF also describes four domains that a successful transformation must involve. These are the parts of your organization that change as you adopt the cloud.
- Technology: the systems, applications, and infrastructure you migrate or build.
- Process: how work gets done, including the practices your teams follow.
- Organization: how teams are structured and how they work together.
- Product: the services and offerings you deliver to customers.
The point is that a real transformation changes more than technology. Your processes, your team structures, and even your products evolve as you take advantage of the cloud.
The four phases of cloud transformation
CAF lays out the work as four phases that repeat as you learn. You move through them step by step rather than trying to do everything at once.
| Phase | Focus |
|---|---|
| Envision | Identify and prioritize the cloud opportunities that match your business goals |
| Align | Find capability gaps across the six perspectives and get stakeholders on the same page |
| Launch | Deliver pilot projects in production and show early, real value |
| Scale | Expand the successful pilots to full production scale and lock in the benefits |
The order matters. You picture the target state first, line up the people and capabilities to get there, prove the idea with small pilots, then grow what works. Each pass teaches you something you use to adjust the plan.
Exam tips
- AWS CAF is guidance for planning a cloud move, not a service or a tool.
- Memorize the six perspectives: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, Operations.
- Business, People, and Governance are business-focused; Platform, Security, and Operations are technical.
- The Security perspective is about confidentiality, integrity, and availability; the People perspective is about skills and culture.
- The four phases run in order: Envision, Align, Launch, Scale.
- Do not confuse CAF (planning the organization's move) with the Well-Architected Framework (designing a single workload).