Use both feet to step onto the Cloud

The early days of Cloud adoption in many large companies are dominated by the creation of Landing Zones (LZs). This term can mean a lot of things, but encapsulates the set of configuration, controls and instrumentation a company uses to set up a Cloud platform to its liking and needs. If a Cloud platform? is like an apartment block, setting up your LZs is like moving your furniture in, putting the locks on the doors and arranging your utilities. You may have people to help you (integrators and consultants in the Cloud, moving companies and interior designers for your apartment), but you are the one who is going to live there.

Many companies struggle in this early stage, as it can feel like they are making their most important decisions at the time they have the least expertise. I have seen this lead to two anti-patterns: the free-for-all and the gold-plated LZ.

The free-for-all: this is not so common today, but used to happen several years ago, when the adoption of Cloud was not a strategic, enterprise choice, but a breakaway movement by developers who had become frustrated with the constraints of on-premise infrastructure. It was characterised by multiple independent teams trying to figure out Cloud for themselves, sometimes resulting in misconfiguration and security gaps. Unsurprisingly, most large, traditional enterprises chose not to live with this situation.

The gold-plated LZ: this is much more common today. Companies know that they must configure and control Cloud to use it safely and effectively, so they define a set of controls, automation and instrumentation, and go about implementing them. And implementing them. And implementing them. This anti-pattern is often characterised by dev teams waiting for a platform that everyone told them was going to be flexible and faster, but never seems to be quite ready for them to use.

The thinking that leads to the gold-plated LZ is easy to understand: I know that I have experienced pressures and made choices that would lead me on a similar path. Cloud comprises fully architected, instrumented and automated platforms that offer flexibility and control at the same time - but also comprises multi-tenant, public platforms connected to public networks, and companies are rightly wary of the consequences of getting things wrong.

Fortunately, I think that there is an antidote to the anti-pattern, and that this antidote better addresses companies’ needs than gold-plating their LZs. That antidote is to walk with both feet.

What I mean by this is that, when we step onto the Cloud, we do so in two ways. We take steps that constitute setup: the creation of LZs, projects, organisations, policies and so on. We also take steps that constitute adoption: the deployment and applications, services and data. If we only take adoption steps, then we create a free-for-all. But if we only take setup steps, then we risk gold-plating our LZs. Furthermore, we risk gold-plating our LZs in the absence of experience: best practice, industry framework and the advice of consultants are all helpful, but we cannot truly understand the environments we are creating for ourselves without experience, and we cannot gain experience without adoption.

Walking with both feet means taking both types of steps together: using our initial setup steps to create the conditions for our first adoption steps; and using our first adoption steps to learn how to take the next setup steps; and so on, step by accelerating step. This requires thinking and planning, as well as a degree of courage and careful workload selection. But done well, that thinking, planning, courage and care can lead to confident and balanced progress.

(Views in this article are my own.)