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Cloud Myths: Cloud is One Size Fits All (Pill 3 of 5 / Cloud Pills)

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Cloud is not for all and will not become a standard and universal solution for any organization, business and workload. Cloud adoption, which is part of the cloud journey, covers multiple cloud vendors, cloud services and on-premises solutions during a 5-10-year period. The cloud solution for your current business might not fit your needs in 5 years. This is normal, part of the lifecycle of a system and needs to be incorporated into it. The assumption that one cloud fits all your needs is an oversimplified approach that leads to a cloud adoption failure.

The impact of a one-size-fits-all approach can affect the operational costs, performance and compliance. Regulatory requirements regarding data residency might not map to one cloud vendor's physical presence. A single cloud model (vendor) with inefficient resource allocation can affect the system's performance. One vendor approach can affects the cloud infrastructure costs, because it force you to pay for service tiers that are under used or not fully map to your specific business needs.

As we don’t build any more monolithic solutions, the same applies to the cloud when we make a cloud strategy for a large ecosystem. The wide variety of services, architectures, approaches and deployment models increase the complexity of defining a cloud strategy and requires agility for 3-5 years. Public cloud vendors provide scalability, agility and flexibility, but when strict compliance requirements are required by organizations (e.g. healthcare, finance) a hybrid approach model is easier and make more sense.

AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud provide a high level of diversity for running workloads for analytics, web APIs, and applications. However, they provide limited functionality when latency-sensitive or high-performance workloads are needed. Even with the HPC (High-Performance Computing) and edge capabilities provided by each cloud vendor, there are cases where they are not enough, and a hybrid approach makes more sense.

An organization should (re)define its cloud strategy every 3-5 years. During that phase, an assessment of workloads, applications, and business requirements is required. A multi-cloud and/or hybrid approach that takes into account all the dimensions (e.g., skills, technical stack, compliance requirements, and business directions) needs to be considered. The cloud strategy should be aligned with the long-term business objectives and avoid the trap of short-term cost savings illusions.

A cloud strategy should not be build only by internal teams, it should be a join venture together with an external party, that knows the cloud and local vendors, the business and the impact of cloud to the business.

 The following tools provided by Microsoft can support you during the assessment and planning phase:

  • Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit: used to assess your on-premises estate
  • Azure Migrate: one location to discover, assess, and plan the migration of databases, apps and workloads
  • Azure Well Architecture Framework: a set of best practices for building efficient, secure, and cost-effective cloud solutions
  • Azure TCO: to understand better the current and future costs

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