Cloud administration

Corporate cloud is bought, not architected. Someone needed a tool, expensed it, and it entered the estate without a review, an owner, or an offboarding path. The characteristic failure is not a bad design — it is discovering the estate years later, one invoice at a time.

This is the cloud the business runs on. For the cloud a product is built on — environments, infrastructure as code, scaling, region failure — see technology:cloud-infrastructure. The two follow different rules and the boundary is worth keeping sharp.

Structure the tenant before you need to

Subscription and account structure encodes what you can later separate: billing, access, policy, and blast radius. Retrofitting it means moving live workloads, so the cheap moment is the first one.

A workable default is to separate by what you would want to bill, govern, or lose independently — production corporate services, non-production, and anything with a distinct compliance obligation. Resist a subscription per team; teams reorganize, and the structure outlives them.