The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF): Six Perspectives for Migration Planning

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) is AWS’s guidance for planning an organization-wide move to the cloud. It organizes the capabilities a company needs into six perspectives: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations. The first three focus on business readiness and the last three on technical readiness. For the CLF-C02 exam, the core skill is mapping a stakeholder, concern, or capability to the correct perspective.

What the AWS CAF is for

Migrating a few servers is a technical task; adopting the cloud across an organization is a transformation that touches budgets, job roles, compliance, and day-to-day operations. The AWS CAF exists to surface those non-technical gaps early. Using it, an organization assesses where it stands in each perspective, identifies gaps (AWS calls the output an action plan), and sequences the work so that people and processes are ready when the technology lands.

The framework is guidance, not a service. There is no CAF console page and nothing to enable. It is applied in workshops and assessments, often with AWS Professional Services or partners, before and during a migration. Keep it distinct from the migration strategies themselves (rehost, replatform, and the rest of the 7 Rs), which describe how individual workloads move; those are covered in AWS migration strategies. The CAF describes how the organization gets ready.

The six perspectives

Each perspective bundles a set of capabilities and maps to the stakeholders who own them.

Business ensures cloud investments accelerate business outcomes. It covers strategy management, portfolio management, innovation, and measuring the value the cloud actually delivers. Typical stakeholders: CEO, CFO, business managers.

People treats cloud adoption as a change-management problem. It covers workforce transformation: training staff on cloud skills, redesigning roles, evolving the culture, and leading the organization through the change. Typical stakeholders: CIO, HR leaders, people managers. If a scenario mentions a skills gap or staff training, this is the perspective.

Governance aligns cloud spending and risk with organizational controls. It covers program and project management, benefits management, cloud financial management (budgeting and controlling cloud costs), and risk management. Typical stakeholders: CFO, CIO, program managers, auditors on the process side.

Platform covers building the technical foundation: architecture design, infrastructure provisioning, modernizing applications, and engineering the environments workloads will run in. Typical stakeholders: CTO, architects, engineers.

Security ensures confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data and workloads. Its capabilities include identity and access management, threat detection, vulnerability management, infrastructure protection, and data protection. Typical stakeholders: CISO, security architects, internal audit.

Operations ensures services are delivered and run to agreed levels. It covers monitoring and observability, incident and problem management, change and release management, and business continuity. Typical stakeholders: operations engineers, site reliability engineers, IT service managers.

Group	Perspectives	Core question it answers
Business capabilities	Business, People, Governance	Is the organization (strategy, staff, controls) ready for the cloud?
Technical capabilities	Platform, Security, Operations	Is the technology (foundation, protection, day-2 running) ready for the cloud?

Transformation domains and journey phases

The current version of the framework (AWS CAF 3.0) adds two structures around the perspectives, and both have started appearing in exam-adjacent study material.

Four transformation domains describe what actually gets transformed: technology (migrating and modernizing infrastructure and applications), process (digitizing and automating operations, often with data and analytics), organization (reimagining how teams are structured and work together), and product (reimagining the business model with new value propositions and revenue models).

Four journey phases describe the recommended cadence: Envision (identify transformation opportunities and tie them to measurable business outcomes), Align (assess capability gaps across the six perspectives and build an action plan), Launch (deliver pilot initiatives in production and prove value), and Scale (expand the pilots to full production scope and sustain the benefits).

For CLF-C02 purposes, the six perspectives carry most of the weight; the domains and phases are recognition-level knowledge.

Business value ties

AWS positions the CAF as reducing business risk, improving environmental, social, and governance outcomes, growing revenue, and increasing operational efficiency. Those phrases occasionally show up as answer options describing what the CAF helps achieve. The unifying idea: the CAF de-risks cloud adoption by making sure every part of the organization, not just the engineering team, is prepared.

How the CLF-C02 exam tests this

• Capability to perspective. The stem names a capability such as training employees on cloud skills, managing cloud budgets, or incident management, and asks which CAF perspective it belongs to. Memorize one anchor capability per perspective: value (Business), training (People), cost and risk controls (Governance), architecture (Platform), IAM and data protection (Security), monitoring and incidents (Operations).
• The People versus Governance trap. Organizational change and staff readiness go to People; program management, budgets, and risk go to Governance. Both sound managerial, so the exam pairs them as distractors.
• Business versus technical grouping. A question asks which perspectives focus on business capabilities. The answer is Business, People, and Governance; Platform, Security, and Operations are the technical three.
• CAF versus other frameworks. A stem describes guidance for planning organizational cloud adoption and offers the Well-Architected Framework as a distractor. The CAF prepares an organization to adopt the cloud; the AWS Well-Architected Framework evaluates how well an individual workload is designed. Organization-level planning means CAF; workload-level design review means Well-Architected.

Quick reference

• AWS CAF = guidance for organization-wide cloud adoption, structured as six perspectives.
• Business perspectives: Business, People, Governance. Technical perspectives: Platform, Security, Operations.
• People = skills, training, culture. Governance = program management, cloud financial management, risk.
• Platform = architecture and foundation. Security = confidentiality, integrity, availability. Operations = running services to agreed levels.
• CAF 3.0 adds four transformation domains (technology, process, organization, product) and four phases (Envision, Align, Launch, Scale).
• The CAF readies the organization; the 7 Rs move individual workloads; Well-Architected reviews workload design.
• It is documentation and a method, not an AWS service you enable.