Recycled Bullsh-IT

(With apologies to Baz Luhrmann’s “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)“)

Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of ‘21, beware XaaS Cloud. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, some Cloud would be it

The long-term benefits of Cloud may not yet have been proven and my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now

Expect some Cloud to give you benefits, but like everything else in life there is a trade-off: flexible but costly; convenient but complex; open but less secure

Some Cloud is not as new or radical as you imagine. We’ve had shared central resources for decades (mainframes and data centres with partitions and virtual machines)

Don’t limit yourself to one cloud provider, but too many will make your life a misery. But beware that all Clouds are not the same, so don’t expect your systems to work everywhere

You shouldn’t talk Cloud to your sponsors – it will just send them to sleep. Talk business value, process improvement or market agility, even if it sends you to sleep

Don’t jump with both feet into some Cloud. It is a journey that will bring increasing value over time, but you can begin small and take small steps to achieve greatness

Cloud technologies are just in their teens. They will refuse to do anything you want them to do; they will be rude to you; and they will embarrass you in front of your users. Treat them firmly but nurture them to maturity

Keep your old systems. You never know when you might need them again. Re-use them by building new presentation layers to make them look and an integration layer to expose their services to the new IoT world

Start your Cloud journey at the beginning, as you would any new adventure. Plan what you want – the Strategy; Visualise your goal – the Future State Architecture; Work out how to get there – the Roadmap

Don’t waste your time on analyst reports, they will only make you feel inadequate

Get to know your users, you never know when they’ll be gone for good (and have taken their business elsewhere)

Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve database performance by throwing more servers at the problem

The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, such as why your Cloud provider won’t let you scale down your estate mid contract to save money

Accept certain inalienable truths: users don’t know what they want, but they know what they don’t want; CFOs will cut your budgets, but not theirs; half of your IT spend is wasted, but you don’t know which half until you have spent it. Use some Cloud to make it look as if you know what you’re doing

Respect your elders; they might not know Kubernetes, but their solutions work, and they have seen it all before

Be careful whose advice you buy and make sure you use it wisely. Be even more careful with free advice, especially from vendors – it can cost you a fortune

But trust me on some Cloud.

John “WISEaaS” Moe