Cloud computing introduces a significant shift in how technology is obtained,
used, and managed. It also shifts how organizations budget and pay for
technology services. Cloud computing benefits organizations by giving them the
ability to trade capital expense for variable expense, gain advantage from
massive economies of scale, make agile capacity decisions, increase business
speed and agility, stop spending money running and maintaining data centers,
and go global in minutes.

With Amazon Web Services (AWS) your organization can immediately provision
the compute, storage, network, and database resources needed for any project.
These resources launch and are ready for use by your project team within
minutes. The environment can be reconfigured easily, updated quickly, scaled
up or down automatically to meet usage patterns and optimize spending, or
shut down temporarily or permanently. The billing for AWS services becomes
an operational expense rather than a capital expense.

Cloud adoption requires that fundamental changes are discussed and
considered across the entire organization, and that stakeholders across all
organizational units—both outside and within IT—support these changes. The
AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) provides guidance that supports
each unit in your organization so that each area understands how to update
skills, adapt existing processes, and introduce new processes to take maximum
advantage of the services provided by cloud computing. Thousands of
organizations around the world have successfully migrated their businesses to
the cloud, relying on the AWS CAF to guide their efforts. AWS and our partners
provide tools and services that can help you every step of the way to ensure
complete understanding and transition.

At the highest level, the AWS CAF organizes guidance into six focus areas. We
describe these focus areas as Perspectives.