The CloudFlex Alliance is a not-for-profit industry body dedicated to advocating for open and best-of-breed enterprise cloud technology ecosystems. As a trusted source of knowledge and expertise, the alliance provides valuable guidance, education, and support to the industry as a whole, with a special focus on organizations transitioning from legacy infrastructure or early cloud implementations to more advanced, financially optimized cloud architectures that leverage the latest benefits of AI.
One of the key objectives of the CloudFlex Alliance is to establish an industry tech standard that defines the modern Azure technology landscape. This standard outlines the best practices, principles, and guidelines for building and operating composable architectures with newer serverless, FinOps, and AI capabilities in addition to legacy needs like microservices, api and headless. It serves as a reference framework that helps organizations understand the prerequisites and requirements to achieve the desired level of technological excellence.
The CloudFlex Alliance is committed to educating and empowering its members and the wider industry on how to navigate the complexities of modern technology adoption. This includes providing guidance on when, where, and how to start the journey towards composable architectures, as well as selecting the right partners and technologies to ensure success. The alliance leverages its collective expertise and experience to provide practical insights, tools, and resources that enable organizations to make informed decisions and mitigate risks during their technology transformation journey. To achieve the industry tech standard defined by the CloudFlex Alliance, organizations need to meet certain prerequisites. These may include implementing serverless computing practices, adopting FinOps-first capabilities for financial optimization, leveraging the latest advancements in AI technologies, and adhering to best practices for building open and interoperable technology ecosystems by leveraging serverless functions as well as Cloud Native offerings . The alliance provides support and guidance to its members in meeting these prerequisites, with the ultimate goal of driving industry-wide excellence and innovation. In summary, the CloudFlex Alliance is a not-for-profit industry body that advocates for open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystems. Through its industry tech standard and educational initiatives, the alliance aims to guide and support organizations in their journey towards composable architectures with serverless, FinOps, and AI capabilities, while promoting best practices and interoperability across the industry.
Furthermore, the CloudFlex Alliance recognizes the importance of partner enablement in creating a multiplier effect within the Azure ecosystem. The alliance facilitates collaboration and integration among its members to foster a composable capability for product integration. This allows partners to leverage each other's strengths and create innovative solutions that have a multiplier effect on the ecosystem as a whole. By promoting interoperability and collaboration among partners, the CloudFlex Alliance aims to accelerate the adoption of advanced technologies and drive increased value for organizations operating in the Azure ecosystem.
The CloudFlex Alliance also places a strong emphasis on supporting legacy needs while embracing newer technologies. The alliance recognizes that organizations may have existing microservices, API, and headless architectures that need to coexist with newer serverless, FinOps, and AI capabilities. The industry tech standard established by the CloudFlex Alliance provides guidance on how to effectively integrate and operate these diverse technologies in a composable manner, enabling organizations to optimize their technology stack and achieve seamless interoperability.
In summary, the CloudFlex Alliance is dedicated to advocating for open and best-of-breed enterprise cloud technology ecosystems, with a focus on composable architectures that leverage the latest benefits of AI, serverless computing, and FinOps. The alliance promotes partner enablement and collaboration to create a multiplier effect within the Azure ecosystem, and provides guidance, education, and support to organizations transitioning from legacy infrastructure to advanced cloud architectures. By establishing an industry tech standard and fostering interoperability, the CloudFlex Alliance aims to drive excellence and innovation across the industry.
- Commercial Ease in overall procurement and accounting by accessing the service through Azure's marketplace eco-system. Licensing is consumption based, like akin to any other Azure service, to scale with your business in a shared success model across vendors.
- Access Service is available in multiple Azure regions with enterprise-grade support SLAs. Additionally, to accelerate innovation, the service supports self-enablement through trial or sandbox access to scale organizational adoption of technology.
- Integration Service follows API-first principles of modern SaaS software to support real-time orchestration and automation of business use cases. Additionally, the data within the platform is accessible to Azure-based storage such that businesses can combine insights and reports across multiple services' data, all operating under the same principles.
- AI Composability Service is pre-integrated to Azure AI to allow customers to adopt an AI-first co-pilot innovations which bridge multiple CloudFlex services at once to unlock the composable power of current and future versions of Generative AI.
Criteria is not vendor based, but specific to services or products offered by vendors which match and are certified by this criteria. Criteria emphasizes ease of procurement for customers and supports emerging criteria for operational composability for businesses within Azure's ecosystem.
| Business Benefit | Criteria | Why it's important |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial | Procurement through Azure Marketplace or Azure's Native ISV Marketplace | Consolidated billing for the customer, simplification of procurement and inheriting the existing qualifications required to participate in the Azure Marketplace. |
| Commercial | Licensing is both subscription and consumption based | Customers can treat these services and PBCs no different than other PaaS services offered on Azure. Customers can easily scale value with the service against an entitlement licensing policy which asserts mutual success between the vendor and customer. |
| Access | Service is available on Azure in at least 2 regions | Signals a maturity of the service to operation and scale globally for customers. |
| Access | Service has 24/7 support available to customers with a published SLA to operate on parity with the broader Azure eco-system of PaaS services. | Service is ready for enterprise and mission-critical business operations through documented points of contact with 24/7 access so customers can scale globally. |
| Access | Service has the ability to self-enable through trial or sandbox access | Improves the scaling of service adoption within the customer's organization through self-enablement access to an independent/non-commercial sandbox service with associated training guides. |
| Integration | Service is API-first via REST or GraphQL | Service supports real-time integration for orchestration of business logic between systems. Additionally demonstrates the ability to automate key operations outside of a business-practioner UI for all key capabilities. |
| Integration | Service has support for exposing customer data to other Azure storage services | Customer can combine and transform data from the service easily in co-located EDW strategy to primarily derive insights and reports through other Azure BI or 3rd party services. |
| AI | Service uses Azure AI within | Service is demonstrating the ability to innovate with a familiarity with the value of Azure AI within their roadmap and delivery to the benefit of new and existing customers. |
| AI | Service is accessible from Generative AI | Customer is able to compose Generative AI use cases across multiple qualifying services through pre-defined integrations the customer can leverage (example being an Azure AI GPT plugin availability). |