Operating model

In this section, we provide a way to understand the operating model you work within, how that model can be visualized, and how, at a team level, you should evolve to extract maximum value from your investment in cloud services. By doing so, you can enhance your operational practices, build agile teams and workloads, and positively contribute to business outcomes.

It is common for your team to exist within multiple organizational layers, and those layers have existing ways of working. Participating with your team in achieving business outcomes means understanding where your teams are in those layers, the position of the teams you interact with, and how they work. Furthermore, teams need to understand their roles in the success of other teams, know the role of other teams in their success, and have shared goals.

These layers make up the overall operating model of the organization. How the organization functions to deliver business outcomes depends upon many factors, such as type, industry, geography, size, and level of autonomy. However, it likely falls into three broad categories:

These organization-level topologies are described in Organize for success.

Your team and workload exist within your organization's operating model. However, it is unreasonable to expect a single operating model to be able to support all teams and their workloads. Therefore, your team also needs its own operating model. This way of working is shaped by your organization, your department, the makeup of your team, and the characteristics of the workload itself.

Most organizations that move to the cloud do so as part of an enterprise transformation program that seeks to unlock new ways of working (the operating model) to support long-term strategic aims. This journey is not a point in time exercise, but a process that requires continual evolution and incremental progress towards the strategic goal. This allows workloads owners to adapt to the evolving operating model with minimal disruption.

Amazon is often used as an example of how a large organization is able to innovate at scale by empowering teams to stay close to customers, rapidly launch innovative products and services, and take advantage of technical architectures that support speed and agility. This required us to restructure how our teams are organized, now known as two-pizza teams. A two-pizza team has all the right resources embedded within it (engineering, testing, product and program management, and operations) to own and run a workload end-to-end.

We advise working towards this operating model as a proven way for workload teams to move quickly and contribute to overall business outcomes in the way that best serves their customers.

Organizations seeking to emulate this success may need to adapt their operating model throughout their transformation journey. At both organization and team level, this requires consideration, planning, and communication. The following section provides a way to visualize these team-level operating models and how they evolve to you build it, you run it.