‘Ahead in the Cloud’
This week I finished reading ‘Ahead in the Cloud’ by Stephen Orban. The book establishes the fact that Cloud computing has become the de-facto foundational technology for driving digital transformation in an Organization. Cloud not only provides easy scalability, elasticity, agility but also provides easy access to multiple services that facilitate AI/ML, IoT, predictive analytics and other new age Tech. use cases. The author provides an example in the book based on his earlier work stint, which is quite eye catching — News Corp saved ~ $100m by migrating 75% of their Apps portfolio to the cloud and in the process also consolidated from 56 data centers to 6. Quite impressive ROI !
Skimming through the book from a business value perspective, the key takeaways for me were as below -
a) Cloud Migration —
The author distills the principles for Cloud migration and outlines 6 strategies or 6 R’s as it’s called for approaches to cloud migration — Re-host (lift & shift), Re-platform (lift-tinker-shift), Re-purchase, Re-architect (micorservices / cloud-native arch.), Retire, Retain.
It’s imperative to identify the right set of applications to be moved to the Cloud first during Discover phase based on their business criticality, application architecture and other criteria as applicable. Getting an easy win in a short amount of time is crucial for sustained momentum to get on with the Cloud journey for the Organization.
Equally critical is the fact that getting to Cloud means figuring out the right ‘DevOps’ process, which may often entail aligning people and process (Change management), i.e., getting the culture right.
b) Re-architecture is easier on the Cloud:
Every Org. wants to get to micro-services based architecture or serverless architecture for their Apps. portfolio as they provide scalability and rapid deployment. It becomes easier to re-architect and constantly refresh the applications once they’re running in the cloud.
The author puts forth — “I believe the ability of these applications to perform and evolve is just as much dependent on their environment as the code or DNA that governs their behavior. The argument I’d like to make here is that the AWS cloud provides a better environment — in terms of size and diversity of services — that is well beyond what most on-premises data centers can provide.”
c) Leveraging Cloud to drive Innovation
Cloud facilitates rapid experimentation, as teams can spin up required instances and services in a jiffy without any large upfront costs involved. Quoting from the book, “Most enterprises have not optimized for agility. If anything, they have optimized for efficiency — for doing what they do at the lowest cost. … I came to realize that a private cloud is not really a cloud at all, and it certainly is not a good use of company resources.”
And further adds — “ One customer we work with, for example, has developed a business case around developer productivity. The customer (rightfully) believes that by migrating its data centers to AWS, and training its developers in the process, each of its 2,000 developers will be 50 percent more productive than they are today. Driven by the elimination of wait time for infrastructure provisioning — and access to more than 80 services they’d otherwise have to build/procure individually — this productivity boost will lead to an additional 1,000 years of developer capacity…each year. The customer intends to use this additional productivity to fund 100 new projects of 10 people each in an effort to find net new growth opportunities.”
d) Cloud Center of Excellence — Cloud CoE
In order to codify the Cloud strategy for the organization, it’s best practice to establish a Cloud CoE with a seed team that can lay out roles & governance model, reference cloud architecture, security models and so on. The author encourages the company to start with small projects, iterate, learn and improve further, in a typical DevOps ‘culture’ way.
Finding the right IT services Partner who can guide and collaborate with the company on their cloud journey is critical, as it can considerably shorten the learning curve and provide much needed expertise & bandwidth to the Organization. In addition, the right cloud services partner can help with continuous optimization of the cloud workloads by ‘tuning the Infra.’ or ‘refactoring the apps’ and so on, thereby providing cost efficiency.
As one of the articles state, “There is no compression algorithm for experience”. It rings so true, there is a considerable merit in experimenting, failing fast and re-trying, which is a much easier process in the Cloud-enabled environment. And who could deny that there’s a larger technology shift happening, underpinning the current digital-first trend, that must be fully appreciated as well.
