Capabilities - Establishing Your Cloud Foundation on AWS

Capabilities

To support cloud adoption, AWS recommends that you have a foundational set of capabilities that enable you to deploy, operate, and govern your workloads.

A capability includes a definition, scenarios, opinionated guidance, and supporting automation to establish and operate a specific part of a cloud environment. Capabilities are components that can help you plan, implement, and operate your cloud environment, and include people, process, and technology considerations. Capabilities are designed to integrate into your overall technology environment.

In addition to technology implementation guidance, capabilities include operational guidance (for instance, notifications, event handling, and remediation, as well as team resource skills and processes) needed to stand up and operate each capability. For an example of what a capability should offer, refer to Appendix A.

AWS has defined a set of 29 capabilities that span six categories to help you establish a cloud foundation.

Table 1 - Cloud Foundations capabilities by categories

Governance, Risk, and Compliance Security Operations Infrastructure Finance Business Continuity
Log Storage Identity Management & Access Control Developer Experience & Tools Network Connectivity Cloud Financial Management Backup & Recovery
Governance Secrets Management Image Management Network Security Resource Inventory Management Disaster Recovery
Audit & Assessment Security Incident Response Observability Workload Isolation Support
Tagging Encryption & Key Management Patch Management Template Management
Service Onboarding Vulnerability & Threat Management
Change Management Application Security
Forensics Data Isolation
Data De-identification
Records Management

Each capability includes stages of maturity that enable you to implement based on where you are in your cloud journey, including your governance and operational requirements. As your cloud environment grows and matures, the capabilities can be enhanced to meet your new requirements.

Capabilities definitions

This section includes high-level definitions for each foundational capability organized by their category. For a deeper dive into a specific capability and what it includes, refer to Appendix A.

A chart showing which capabilities fall under each category.

29 capabilities across six categories

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