9 Emerging Operational Gaps That Will Accelerate Cloud Adoption — Part 1

Hope Is Not a Strategy

Heard in sales, politics, the Google SRE book (available online for free), hope isn’t a viable strategy by itself but it can lead to a strategy for success, especially when utilizing cloud technologies. These technologies are at a turning point for enterprise operations; they are now helping ideas evolve from the hopeful claims of a Solutions Architect to driving business strategies financed by C-level execs. And these projects are the basis of several successful strategies in the last year, focusing on modernizing the Production technology stack.

From migrating applications to a new platform, to implementing CI/CD workflows, to enabling developers and operators with new tools, these cloud adoption strategies will ramp-up globally over the next 5 years. Are you ready to modernize?

From Ideas to Outcomes

Consider these relatable statements, perhaps heard during a strategic roadmap discussion:

• We hope by moving our application portfolio to a new platform, we will significantly increase the speed of development and deployment to Production.
• Our IT team hopes introducing cloud infrastructure to our stack will significantly reduce operations cost of maintaining on-premise data centers.
• The developers hope that by implementing a modern storage solution, we will improve time spent finding data by 60%, and increase the security and availability of our business analytics.

Hope is a feeling of trust, and it is also the basis of every successful strategy. Especially in software-powered industries, where a growing menu of options are available to run the business and the risk of failure is increasingly high. Decision makers must choose a technology stack that will:

• Take the business to the next level, and rise above the competition
• Maintain availability and reliability for the next 10 years
• Increase operations efficiency
• Mitigate problems that are consuming limited operations resources

Taking all of this into account, a leader can make a strategic decision with hopes to move the business forward, and hand-off the project to a trusted team; now it is up to that team to turn once hopeful statements into real solutions.

The Cycle of Evolution

Okay great, now let’s DevOps the sh*t out of this; we’ll call it the Cloud Migration Project. A trusted team now spends months executing a solution that will:

• Refactor and containerize most of the business application stack
• Implement new CI/CD workflows from development to Production
• Migrate most of the Production systems and teams to a new platform

This is done all while utilizing emerging cloud technologies and hopefully, it is a success. Unfortunately, these long-term greenfield initiatives may never see success, though.

Partially because the cycle of evolution is outpacing the implementation speed of cloud-native solutions. So before the team can properly roll out today’s solution, tomorrow’s new shiny object becomes a distraction. In our example, the Cloud Migration Project won’t nearly be complete when architects and engineers start thinking about the Better Cloud Migration Project; not to mention stalling adoption while (re)training teams on new processes and technologies.

How can you mitigate failure of a project like this? Deliver a viable solution faster, and prove the benefits. To start, take a look at your operations technology stack. Consider gaps in the following areas:

1. Monitoring
2. Dashboards
3. Alerting
4. Logging
5. Load balancing and routing
6. Concurrent pipelines
7. Capacity planning
8. Resource throttling
9. Troubleshooting

In Part 2 of this post, we will cover a brief gap-assessment in these 9 areas. We will also exemplify how you can utilize existing cloud-native technologies to close those gaps today with a modern platform (hint: Kubernetes). Furthermore, describing how you can use this platform to accelerate cloud adoption by demonstrating business value quickly, and evangelizing through people, process, and technology.