The Cloud! Resist the temptation of Getting started, somewhere, somehow...
Everyone wants to identify themselves with Cloud some or other way, success or failure, beneficial or not so beneficial. We all the time hear, “somewhere we need to start”, “lift and shift”, “as a first step let us move everything to private cloud” and effort plus money has been spent on procuring servers, provisioning, deploying applications and BANG, “it stopped working” to “company policies do not allow the access, hence available only on the internal network” end up facing many issues that makes us wonder “Is Cloud a reality?”.
Of course, Cloud is a reality in this era due to the advancements and the affordability in the 1. Communication channels in terms of speed, 2. Hardware chips in terms of its high density storage and the processing speed i.e. increased computing power and 3. Concept of the virtualization software. However what we fail to understand is, these are just enablers, yeah powerful enablers, but not the solution itself.
The cloud roadmap trend generally is
- Move the non-core business processes and services to realize hard commercial ROI
- Transition the non-critical business applications to get the comfort of being on cloud
- Now, Lift and shift the rest as we are on cloud for quite some time and have gained experience.
However without analyzing and understanding the stateful nature of our applications that would enable us to adopt a cloud based delivery model to integrate effectively into the native features of the cloud platform, such as databases, messaging, queueing, auto scaling and load balancing,
==> there is no possibility of delivering on demand services, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, or broad network services,
==> leading to higher costs, poor application performance and frustrated users.
So, resist the temptation. Develop a robust cloud transformation strategy. There is no one single strategy that’d cater to every organization/business, but do not start with analyzing the cloud offerings and the service providers, rather start with where you are today 1. as an Organization, the maturity level of various business stakeholders to adapt to the change if not to embrace the change and 2. in technology, the various technological applications, their levels of maturity (legacy to latest trend) and the integration needs (how intertwined they are). After all if we do not understand our setbacks to know our needs, how are we going to assess the benefits?
Engineering manager of R&D and data search
11yits always about how to use, rather than what to use
Cloud, sometimes makes things worse!
Right - cloud is a leveraged model - companies did this in the 90's by "partnering" with other companies that could share the burden of doing that "thing". Utilizing cloud shares the burden of technical needs - it can make data more accessible, increase compute capacity, and where appropriate, can offer a totally new way of doing business, for example.
Worth the read, especially if you're just starting the shift to "cloud first".
Good article.