As if anyone needs to be reminded, there’s a ridiculous amount of hype surrounding cloud. There’s always oodles of hype around any new technology that is not well understood—I believe the correct term for this is product marketing. There are at least seven deadly sins that can be committed when determining a cloud strategy. Your mortality may vary.
Anger: Cloud Will Fix Your Intractable IT Department
Many organizations and agencies have become frustrated by the pace and inflexibility of their IT departments to embrace innovation. As the industry has evolved, more regulatory compliance has been wrapped around (mostly) transactional forms of computing. It has been so difficult to get IT departments to make things to work and be compliant, that once achieved, most were loathe to entertain any hint of further change. The darker side of hiding behind compliance and policy can often be tribalism, headcount Darwinism, or institutional inertia.
Cloud cannot fix an IT organization’s behavior. Some of the motivation to move to cloud can often be traced back to this frustration, but some of the motivation is an authentic (possibly naïve) desire to move to simpler technology.
Many IT organizations see these initiatives as a huge disruptive threat, not an opportunity. When the frustration with IT causes business units to hire their own staff to go around IT altogether (aka shadow IT), this bleeds power away from entrenched constituencies including vendor constituencies. I have witnessed IT-sponsored witch-hunt meetings disguised as use-case outreach. Not all shops are this crazy, and not all politics can be bypassed, but some enterprises and agencies won’t have the motivation or political capital to re-engineer their IT strategy and that will limit the benefits of using new technologies to improve a business. A successful digital transformation strategy (or any strategy) can never ignore political reality. Turns out, organizations are full of humans with varying degrees of motivation. Who knew?
Greed: Moving to the Cloud is Cost-Effective
Investing in a cloud strategy based solely on the need to save operating costs might be an easier argument than one based on anthropology, but the ROI math can be quite tricky. Any strategy that claims to save zillions should be run by somebody who understands licensing contracts.
Realizing a net reduction in OPEX is dependent on how easy it is to stop paying Tier 1 vendors, which is their margins’ lifeblood. Many enterprise-wide contracts have been negotiated in such a way that a net reduction in license or support fees is either too complex to tackle or would result in a larger bill for a smaller footprint. Vendors deep-discount the initial licensing and use their leverage when it comes time for customers to actually reduce their license burden and then they start charging full retail prices. Short of completely deleting all of the vendors’ installed software, it will take organizations years to reduce this burden. Read the fine print.
Sloth: Private Clouds Are Easy to Set Up
If you decide to have a private cloud, then you must build it, not install it. The catch to DIY is that some platform skill is required to stand up the first couple of racks. And building a few racks of cloud computing is cheap and low risk, but you can’t do it with 1990s transactional doctrine.
As business units learn how to use cloud technologies, their platform scientists will learn how to do the next-gen infrastructure. DIY cloud deployment requires a platform science development group, not an IT group that consists mostly of admins and operators. If you choose to acquire on-prem cloud infrastructure, it will still need to be customized to your needs—not impossible, but necessary. And you will still need chops to write production-grade software. Although some production environments are more disparate and complex than OS source trees, many IT shops still don’t use version control tools like github or subversion. Treating production like a product is also helped along by a software engineering doctrine that is sensitive to operations.
Envy: Cloud Will Create Many New Jobs
Maybe. Just not entry-level administrator jobs. Any technology designed to run on cheap, unreliable hardware was also designed to be very low maintenance. At cloud scale, administration has to be automatic and self-healing. Unlike massive EMC SANs, Cisco backbones and Oracle databases, administrators are no longer needed to babysit cloud infrastructure. There is a growing need for highly specialized Data Scientists and Data Engineers, but software that can run in any cloud must, by definition, be resilient.
Pride: Everything Shall Run in the Cloud
The easiest workloads for clouds are webmail and e-commerce front-ends, and some analytics workloads. There are two very simple rules to scalability: never write, never share. Technologies like Gmail and Big Query were designed to (mostly) never write and (rarely) share. They also run on very cheap, purpose-built servers because that’s all you (or even Sergey) can afford when you have to buy zillions of them.
Lots of legacy application stacks won’t work in a cheap, highly scalable environment, either because the legacy workloads are too much trouble to migrate, or there are …pause for dramatic effect… transactions involved. Transactional platforms often have to pretend to be in 30 places at once so that strict coherency is upheld. They also have to stick to their guns after the power is restored so that your airline reservations still exists. This is why reservation systems remain some of the nastiest ones to scale.
Gluttony: Clouds Must be Built With Tier 1 Hardware
Since we’ve already witnessed IT sticking with what they know, and have some anthropological satisfaction as to why, whenever they attempt to build their own cloud, it ends up on hardware designed for software written in the 1990s (if you’re lucky). That multi-million dollar pile of gear underwrote the software that demanded over-engineered, extremely reliable hardware.
Whenever Oracle committed your paycheck to an EMC SAN, then those bits had better stay there, or your quarter close became a Spanish inquisition. That Tier 1 hardware is for software from an era that financially and technically pre-dated web-scale computing.
Lust: Clouds Need Shiny New Hardware
You may be relieved to hear that lust and gluttony are interchangeable in this atlas of sin. If one is selling Tier 1 hardware for customers to build clouds, gluttony and lust quickly reverse. But other vendors have started to sell “cheap” new commodity hardware. This is where lust can be evenly distributed between groups that want shiny new objects and the groups that will accommodate them.