5 BIG COMPANIES MISTAKES MOVING TO CLOUD WITHOUT A GOOD PLAN
A lot was discussed, and still have been, about cloud journey. The worldwide big companies already have their strategy turned to cloud ever since the applications start being planned. Potentials of security, scalability, autonomy and many other related subjects are not approached on time of project discussion anymore. The cloud doesn’t generate doubts or lack of trust anymore. Once going to cloud is an old subject, beside the attention points already brought, I discuss here some errors I’ve already seen, as a way to support and contribute to new moves:
Face cloud as a side-need
The cloud is the main actor on applications. It’s very common to see companies starting their journey with simple backup or storage routines on cloud. This way they can start dismissing their own datacenters. It’s an important step, many times needed to show safety to a skeptical to changes board. But rollback, backup, disaster recovery, and many other routines, which used to be hard to implement to OPS teams, are now trivial to big cloud players. Using cloud having only this objective is to underestimate cloud’s potential.
Self-managed services have a very high level of automation on the points shown above. Get the benefits from processes automation, and don’t waste time and money researching, planning and implementing. The not self-managed services also have a lot of automation built-in. Backup, rollback and DR are now the basics.
Decision matrix negligence
The option for one or another cloud provider is something very important and for many times underestimated. Selecting a cloud provider is like a marriage and can bring troubled relations! I’ve seen companies trying to run away from its 10 or 20 years traumatic contracts with giants like Oracle or IBM, neglecting cloud decision matrix. They ended up signing new contracts leading to new 10 or 20 years contracts with provider X or Y.
Big players like Google, SAP, IBM and SAP allow a very high level of customization. Keep it in your mind during the decision. Those will allow to configure everything needed to a big application. They cover dependencies, integrations and relationships with other systems, specific engineering practices and etc. It’s also very common that complex applications can aggregate benefits from multi-cloud operations. As an instance: infrastructures that has lower prices on provider X can get benefits from FaaS Bigdata services from provider Y, which is faster treating large data volumes. This way one single application can be distributed over more than one cloud provider and also over more than one geographic region. It allows business objectives like cost saving, delay reduction and access to specific features from niche players.
Beside the big players, there are many niche providers of PaaS and FaaS. Digital Ocean, Heroku, Umbler and Elastichosts as instances, are useful for not so robust applications. Those platforms have high abstraction levels, and it cuts the development/operations team learning path.
Low knowledge of the potential of the chosen cloud
The savings that can be reached using cloud resources, like rollback, DR, backup (mentioned above), monitoring, alerts and automated actions, are very high. Consider it when executing your migration project!
Evaluate PaaS services to run applications or FaaS for network tasks, Machine Learning, deploy, tests and other. As an example, I’ve seen that every company that had software running over on premise infrastructure, ended up at sometime developing something to improve its deploy and testing tasks. It means that, if 10 companies developed similar software, costing 500h each, they would have spent 5000h creating almost equal software. Having services like CodeDeploy, Device Farm, Fastlane and Firebase, this kind of development is not needed anymore. Fast access to these services saves many development hours. It gives more speed to companies and it means they will be able to answer faster to their customer needs.
Low tracking on investment
Do not treat cloud budget as a black box. Track the investment via capable people and separate it by application/business/whatever making sense on that reality. This way true decisions will be taken, contracting or refusing some evaluated service. This is one more practice to prevent the “marriage” with a cloud provider get similar to those contracts of many years with Oracle, IBM and etc, which all big company try to run away nowadays. We have already made mistakes in the past. Let’s learn with them!
No updates
As an example, it’s still common for companies to invest amounts of money buying different mobile devices to test apps. Lack of knowledge about services that allow to automatize testing on those devices make that money to keep being wasted and the benefits of automation not reaching the development process.
With more and more niche competitors growing, the lack of updates to the responsible team can be a big problem. Not knowing good alternatives to current services forbids you to discover and use new benefits.
