Mark Makary Blog

Why Cloud fails?

Attempting to migrate to the Cloud without thoughtful planning and adopting the proper Cloud-Native architecture proved to be problematic and dangerous, it could easily lead to the failure of a strategic Cloud Migration initiative.

Lightbend recently released their “Cloud Native Adoption Trends” survey, this is Gold, it is an eye opener and must read for technology and tech savvy business executives.

The survey showed a strong Cloud adoption on the business side, check the full report here.

Ironically, it highlighted unexpected point of view by the architects and the developers.

Quote from the report at the finding “number four”,

Developers and Executives Don’t Always Prioritize the Same Things
One thread that runs through all of the above findings is a discrepancy
between what developers and managers prioritize, despite a general belief
among most respondents that business leaders understand the benefits of moving to the cloud.

You would expect the opposite, right?

Where’s the gap then?

It’s easy to explain the business interest and value; in the Cloud you can find faster time to market and relatively reasonable start-up cost, however, faster time-to-market is not necessarily means faster time-to-value.

How about IT and the software development world?

The Cloud is completely different from the traditional data center environment. It’s distributed by nature, there’s no well defined boundaries and it presents several challenges right out of the gate. 

Scalability, elasticity, meeting the SLA, staying within the budget, most importantly security and honoring the promise of faster time to market.

Even Though, we made a lot of progress on containerization, container orchestration using Kubernetes, Microservices Architecture, Reactive Architecture, Cloud-Native Architecture and Reactive Technologies; we still struggle with this.

Because it’s hard for us as architects and developers to adapt to this, it is definitely outside the comfort zone, this is not the way we have been building solutions for the last 15+ years.

The most common and traditional approach to migrate solutions to the cloud is lift and shift. Wishing that, first, we will migrate off this ball of mud, -the monolith- and then, in the near future, we will do this right, It might never happen or it would take way longer than it should and that diminishes the value of moving to the Cloud.

To make things worse, whenever an organization suffers from this Cloud fatigue syndrome, they look to replace their technical staff with more cloud-savvy resources, which are really hard to find and that usually lead to a vicious circle of fire and hire or at times rehire. 

It’s true that, “The most dangerous prison is in our heads”, it’s hard to adapt and change, but we have to; this is how we evolve.

A better approach is to focus on smart outsourcing, and adopting an active learning strategy, a mix of guidance and learning can place the organization on the right path.