From Skeptic to Enthusiast: Now That Cloud Is Boring, It Is Finally Interesting

My work as a technology leader is more often marked and differentiated by the human element than technology itself. Certainly, on this blog, the vast majority of my articles are about people and organizations in the enterprise technology context more than about the actual technology.

However, as a technology leader, I often embark upon intellectual journeys as well. Many are specific, but this one is general. It applies to almost every sizable corporation. If you are an enterprise technology leader, chances are good that you are somewhere on the same journey as I am.

The cloud

The term itself is over-used, ambiguous, and up until recently, over-hyped. Since so much hype and marketing had been wrapped around the term, it has become really hard to have a specific and meaningful discussion about the cloud without diving deeper into more specific language and terminology.

Cloud as a term has been around for quite some time, but I often think about the general availability of Amazon Web Services in 2006. This was was the first public cloud Infrastructure as a Service and the beginning of cloud as we know it. That was 13 years ago. Think about that for a moment. In technology years, that was forever ago. Some of my team members were in elementary school back then.

What happened to the hype?

Due to the maturity of cloud computing, the hype has really started to die down. When I attend technology leadership conferences, cloud is somewhat of a dead topic. Everyone wants to talk about the hot new thing. In 2019, Robotic Process Automation seems to be the hype-topic du jour.

So here we are in 2019, and cloud has become kind of boring. It’s boring because we know what there is to know, and there isn’t much to discuss. Or is there?

My history

I spent many years as a cloud-skeptic for a really good reason. I worked in data centers. I hosted public-facing multi-tenant applications that were sold as “Software as a Service.” I was the figurative “man behind the curtain.” I pulled the knobs and levers to make the cloud work. There was no magic, it was just marketing plus good technology work.

Public cloud Infrastructure as a Service was initially targeted at high tech companies that were building brand new custom technologies that were “born in the cloud” or “cloud native.” At the time, that was a very specific architecture that I will simplify into a concept: scale-out applications that run on commodity hardware.

Application architectures usually scale vertically or horizontally. Most traditional applications scale vertically. Most modern applications scale horizontally. Horizontally scaling applications often don’t have much for hardware requirements. It’s not an issue if they happen to be executing on an average server with average specifications and very few features.

If you tried to run a traditional application in the public cloud, it was bound to disappoint.

The enterprise

Not all enterprises are the same, but they all tend to run a lot of traditional applications. Sure, every technology leader will talk-up the fancy new cloud-native apps they are building, but that usually represents a negligible minority of the applications in the portfolio they support.

The backlash

Some technology leaders believed the hype, or responded to some mandate, and put their workloads into the public cloud only to regret it. The performance was lackluster and the costs were high. The supposed agility they hoped for didn’t materialize for some reason or another.

That resulted in either a retreat or an endorsement of a hybrid or private cloud strategy.

Hybrid and Private

Hybrid cloud is a fashionable position to take nowadays, but it seems to lack courage or conviction in my opinion. It’s a position that allows an enterprise to put some nominal amount of workload into the pubic cloud while continuing to do things more or less the old-fashioned way. That might not be fair, but that's what I think of when I heard the term, “hybrid cloud.”

Private cloud is similar. A private cloud is basically a traditional data center by a different name, with strong intentions to deliver more automation and self-service capabilities.

It’s not that hybrid and private cloud initiatives aren’t good, it’s just that they are incremental. They are public cloud-inspired, but not cloud-native. When you compare the capabilities head to head, they don’t measure-up.

Being fully transparent, I embraced these ideas and used these terms myself for quite a while, but have now moved on.

The new public cloud

Now I am going to get to the punchline. I can’t put my exact finger on the timeline, but in the past 12-18 months, I believe there has been a seismic shift in public cloud technology. It may have happened earlier, but I didn’t notice it until recently.

The public cloud no longer sells commodity hardware. In fact, it is the only place where you can get the most advanced infrastructure technology. Buying your own hardware and installing it in your data centers is by comparison, commodity nowadays. This is a complete reversal.

Also, you can now run some of the most demanding vertically scaling traditional applications in the public cloud better than you can run them in your own data centers. Again, this is a brand new reversal that didn’t used to be the case.

The irony

The shocking thing in my mind is that neither of these seismic shifts got much attention in technology leadership circles, at the least not the ones I run around in.

I think the problem is that cloud became worn out from the hype before it became mature. Now that it is mature and deserves the hype, we are bored with it and need something else to talk about.

I cannot tell you how excited I am about public cloud technology. It is finally living up to the hype now that the hype is gone. It is our present and future. We won’t be there overnight, but we are pursing public cloud technology enthusiastically.

As science fiction author William Gibson once said, “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”

The resistance

I’ve told you where I’ve come from. This has been an intellectual journey. I’ve challenged my own assumptions. In light of new evidence, I’ve reexamined opinions and decisions that I previously formed. It takes a lot of intellectual honesty to do that. It’s been a challenge for me, but a satisfying adventure nonetheless.

Are you still a cloud skeptic?

You are out there. There are lots of you reading this article right now. Yes, I’m talking to you. This is going to sound like an old Ford commercial, but have you driven a public cloud lately? It’s better than it used to be.

If you are still skeptical and are clinging to ideas of private and hybrid cloud to placate or pacify, I challenge you to look yourself in the mirror: What do you personally have to lose? Are you being intellectually honest, or just clinging to what is familiar and listening to voices that reinforce your own biases?

For my non-technical audience:

If you are still with me, I have a message for you. Perhaps cloud doesn’t matter to you. What are the subtle yet seismic forces changing your industry for good? Is there something that was over-hyped early on, rejected, but now mature and relevant? Intellectual honesty is a critical skill for leaders of all disciplines. What is your intellectual journey like?

Read this article on my blog site or listen to it on my podcast.