Phases of Cloud Adoption
Phases of Cloud Adoption
The following article discusses the phases of cloud adoption.
Having worked with several companies over the past few years, I have gained insight into how organisations adopt the cloud. I have seen the same journey’s good, bad, and ugly sides. My observations of how most organisations embrace the cloud can be categorised into three phases: Cloud v1.0, v2.0 and v3.0.
Cloud v1.0
Most organisations begin their Cloud v1.0 journey when they realise there is an urgent need to start innovating faster. The decision is usually business-driven.
They are more or less trying to answer the following question: “How can we start embracing the cloud as part of our digital transformation when the time-to-market is critical for our applications and services?”
Hence, they focus on increasing the agility of the development teams within their organisation, allowing them to develop applications more quickly and effectively. That usually catalyses the organisation’s beginning point. Most companies start by signing a corporate agreement with one of the three major players (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and commit anything from a few thousand to a few million to start their multiyear journey.
Next, they hand the keys to the development teams to start building apps. As you might expect, turning the keys to the developers and allowing them to do anything they want has created a wild west situation. As a result, a few months down the line and as the project proceeds, the companies face several issues:
- Out of control Costs: unsure what they are paying and why
- Account and Resource sprawl: Unused cloud resources or services are “idle” in one or several accounts.
- Chaos and Anarchy: Every team uses different tools, processes & architecture principles to build and deliver their app.
- Security and Compliance: Application teams focus on adding features rather than creating a secure and compliant cloud platform.
Cloud v2.0
The cloud v2.0 phase begins with organisations rethinking their approach to address the issues faced during cloud v1.0.
They are internally attempting to address the question, “How can we establish a secure and standardised platform?”
A Cloud Platform, DevOps, or SRE team is formed to provide a consistent and well-architected platform. This single team of cloud experts treats developers like internal customers. The platform tier is the central point where patterns, security policies and best practices are applied. As the cloud team evolves, its capabilities expand to include other services such as CI/CD. Cloud v3.0
Moving on from the v2.0 phase, the leaders of an organisation now need to expand on the existing framework.
“We have early adopters or mature users making up 20%, and another 80% require CI/CD and DevOps guidance. How can we help them?”
It’s time to evolve the platform team that has served them well in version 2.0. About ~30% of engineers will remain in the original team. These engineers will continue adding new features like multi-tenancy, multi-region, and multi-cloud and maintain the platform for the rest. The development teams are transformed into squads with DevOps engineers working alongside them.
With this approach, companies adopt a modern mindset to innovate faster and enable their teams to handle Development, Operations, and Cloud Technologies as one team. We call this approach v3.0, and it builds on the v2.0 approach. It’s safe to say that the organisations in the cloud v3.0 journey are the elite performers.
In the cloud v3.0 phase, there are several benefits, including:
- Deploy on-demand: Perform multiple deployments every day.
- Change lead time: In less than one hour.
- Restore a broken service: In less than one hour.
- Change failure: Rate between 0%–15%.
- Trunk-based development: Work in small batches and frequently merge into a shared repository.
- Observability tools: Monitor the health of the overall system.
That’s all for now. It would be great to hear from my LinkedIn network about your progress with adopting the cloud. Let’s exchange ideas and share some war stories on cloud adoption.
