Skip to main content

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

By

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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to audit an Azure Cosmos DB

By
In this post, we will talk about how we can audit an Azure Cosmos DB database. Before jumping into the problem let us define the business requirement: As an Administrator I want to be able to audit all changes that were done to specific collection inside my Azure Cosmos DB. The requirement is simple, but can be a little tricky to implement fully. First of all when you are using Azure Cosmos DB or any other storage solution there are 99% odds that you’ll have more than one system that writes data to it. This means that you have or not have control on the systems that are doing any create/update/delete operations. Solution 1: Diagnostic Logs Cosmos DB allows us activate diagnostics logs and stream the output a storage account for achieving to other systems like Event Hub or Log Analytics. This would allow us to have information related to who, when, what, response code and how the access operation to our Cosmos DB was done. Beside this there is a field that specifies what was th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Can User Technical Profile Influence AI Architecture Decisions?

By
In the last few days, I ran a small experiment on Devin/Windsurf/Cascade, BMAD, and LLM-based architecture decisions. The initial concern was simple: if an AI coding assistant knows something about the user, for example, that the user is a Java developer or a .NET developer, can this information influence the architecture and technology stack that the AI will propose? This question is important because many companies are starting to use AI tools not only for coding but also for product discovery, architecture, documentation, and technical decision-making. If the AI is influenced by the developer's personal profile, the result may not be fully neutral. It may look like a business or architecture decision, but in reality, it may be partially shaped by the context of the person using the tool. The test was done using BMAD with Devin/Windsurf/Cascade. The scenario was a unified field service operations platform. The task was to let BMAD refine the product, define the architecture and s...
Post a Comment
Read more

ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded

By
Today blog post will be started with the following error when running DB tests on the CI machine: threw exception: System.InvalidOperationException: The Entity Framework provider type 'System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer' registered in the application config file for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded. Make sure that the assembly-qualified name is used and that the assembly is available to the running application. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260882 for more information. at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DependencyResolution.ProviderServicesFactory.GetInstance(String providerTypeName, String providerInvariantName) This error happened only on the Continuous Integration machine. On the devs machines, everything has fine. The classic problem – on my machine it’s working. The CI has the following configuration: TeamCity .NET 4.51 EF 6.0.2 VS2013 It see...
8 comments
Read more