Being involved in cloud services and working closely with cloud providers over the past 10 years has given us a great deal of insight into the triumphs and pitfalls of cloud consumers. We’ve distilled that vast experience and come up with our list of the 5 most important lessons we’ve learned over the past decade for users that are experienced in the cloud with multiple applications/workloads running.
1. Governance – Tagging, Tools, and Automation
Many of our customers have hundreds, if not thousands of accounts, and we’ve helped them solve many of their governance challenges. One challenge is ensuring they’re not doing certain things – for example, shadow IT and functioning in siloes. In the cloud, you want everyone to have visibility into best practices and understanding the critical role cloud plays in creating business value.
There are numerous tools and automation methods you can leverage to ensure your governance is in step with the latest innovation. First and foremost, a strong tagging strategy is critical. As with shadow IT, if you don’t tag things correctly, your teams can spin up resources with limited visibility on who owns them, continuously running and accumulating expenses over time. If you don’t start with a tagging strategy from day one, retroactively correcting is a herculean task. Starting with a strong architectural foundation and making sure that foundation stays in place with the proper tools will ensure governance doesn’t become a burden.
Putting the proper guardrails in place for this, such as AWS Config, can help overcome this challenge and make sure everybody’s following the rules. Sometimes governance and moving fast can seem like adversaries, but automation can help satisfy both.
2. Optimization – It’s not a one-time exercise
Cloud users tend to think of optimization in terms of Reserved Instances (RI), but it reaches far beyond just RIs. Well-defined policies must exist to exhibit control over spend and discipline to go along with policies.
There are many ways to leverage cloud native solutions and products to achieve optimization as well as new classes of service. One key point is leveraging the right resources where appropriate. As new services come out and skills increase within organizations, the opportunity to not only optimize spend but optimize the applications themselves by leveraging more cloud native services will continue to drive down operating cost.
Optimization is not a one-time exercise, either. It’s an ongoing practice that needs to be done on a regular basis. Like cleaning out the garage, you need to maintain it. Who’s responsible for this? Often, it’s your company’s Cloud Center of Excellence, or a partner like 2nd Watch.
3. Cloud Center of Excellence – Be bold and challenge the norm
We encourage all organizations to form a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE). Typically lead by an executive, your CCoE should be a multi-stakeholder organization that includes representatives from all areas of the business. With the multi-skilled group, you benefit from subject matter experts across a wide variety of areas within your organization who collectively become subject matter experts in cloud services and solutions. When you break down siloes, you’re able to move rapidly.
Your CCoE should be formed at the beginning of your migration and continue to revisit new capabilities released in the cloud on an ongoing basis, updating the organization’s standards to ensure enforcement.
One of the CCoE’s biggest roles is evangelizing within the organization to ensure people are embracing the cloud and celebrating successes, whether it comes from implementing DevOps with cloud native tools or optimizing and cloud refactoring. The CCoE’s motto should is, ‘Be bold, challenge the norm, look for new ways of doing things, and celebrate BIG.’
4. Multi-Cloud – Get out of your comfort zone
As an advanced user, you have grown up with AWS and have a solid understanding and background of AWS. You’ve learned all the acronyms for AWS and understand the products and services. But now you’re being asked to integrate another CSP provider you might not be as familiar with. How do you take that basic cloud knowledge and transition to Azure or GCP?
There’s a little bit of a learning curve, so we recommend taking a training course. Some even offer training based upon your knowledge of AWS. For example, GCP offers training for AWS professionals. Training can help you acclimate to the nomenclature and technology differences between CSPs.
We typically see customers go deep with one cloud provider, and that tends to be where most workloads reside. This can be for financial reasons or due to skills and experience. You get a greater discount when you push more things into one CSP. However, some solutions fit better in one CSP over the other. To maximize your cloud strategy, you need to break down walls, get out of your comfort zone, and pursue the best avenue for the business.
5. Talent – Continuously sharpen the knife’s edge
Talent is in high demand, so it can be challenging to attract the top talent. One way to overcome this is to develop talent internally. All cloud providers offer certifications, and incentivizing employees to go out there and get those certifications goes a long way. With that, success breeds success. Celebrate and evangelize early wins!
The cloud changes fast, so you need to continuously retrain and relearn. And as a bonus – those individuals that are involved in the CCoE have the unique opportunity to learn and grow outside of their area of expertise, so proactively volunteer to be a part of that group.
If you want more detailed information in any of these five areas, we have a wealth of customer examples we’d love to jump into with you. Contact us to start the conversation.
-Ian Willoughby, Chief Architect and Skip Barry, Executive Cloud Enablement Director
