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> I think a lot of orgs move to cloud simply because it's popular and gartner told them so. Nah, I think it's mostly about the second part of your comment. Ev

by sofixa 3y ago

> I think a lot of orgs move to cloud simply because it's popular and gartner told them so. Nah, I think it's mostly about the second part of your comment. Everyone hates waiting for months to get a VM or a database or a firewall rule because the infrastructure/DBA teams are stuck ten years in the past and take pride in their artisanal infrastructure building. So moving to the cloud eliminates a useless layer of time wasting,

MaKey 3y ago
The layer will still be there, because those teams are now managing some cloud infrastructure central to the organization.
nikau 3y ago
It also allows management to hide bad decisions and poor planning. Project is a dud? just nuke the cloud project and no more charges for it. Project is poorly architected and running like a dog? throw more resources at it. Both of the above are harder to hide when you have to order equipment for on prem.
- ownagefool 3y ago
  If you're running an internal cloud, you can likely absorb that. I think comes down to a couple of things: - Small orgs don't have the resources to run internal clouds, nor should they be doing so. This limits the pipeline of available candidates. - Large orgs promote the wrong people to management, and they make decisions based on their mental model of the world that was developed 20 years ago. They're filled with people who don't understand the difference between cloud and virtualization. - Large consultancies make more money by throwing raw numbers at the problem rather than smart automation. i.e. it's easier for IBM to bill T&M and a whole project wrapper to patch the server than automate it. - Finance & HR teams want you to bend to their ways of working rather than the opposite. Of the rest, you get into many of them are simply in ops because they're less skilled software developers, or they're now being asked to assure security, and that scares them so they try to lock everything down.
- yau8edq12i 3y ago
  > Project is a dud? just nuke the cloud project and no more charges for it. How is that a negative? Not every project is going to be successful. That's just a basic fact of life. That you don't have to deal with the sunk cost fallacy and just pull the plug is a good thing. > Project is poorly architected and running like a dog? throw more resources at it. Another positive...?! You can continue to serve your clients and maintain a revenue stream while you work on a better architecture. Instead of failing completely. And once you need less ressources, you easily scale down.
sgarland 3y ago
If only that were the case. Even when everything is in IaC and 100% cloud-native, I’ve still seen dev teams bypass the approved methods because ClickOps is easier.
steveBK123 3y ago
If your on-prem team can't spin up a VM same day, then firing them is probably higher ROI than "going to cloud". Further, a lot of the shops "going to cloud" because their infra team is slow.. then hide cloud behind their infra team. A prior 200+ dev shop went from automated on-prem VM builds happening within hours from when you raise a ticket, to cloud where there was a slack channel to nag&beg for an EC2 which could take a day to a week. This was not a temporary state of affairs either, it was allowed to run like this for 2 years+. Oh and, worth mentioning, CTO there LOVED him some Gartner.
- marcus0x62 3y ago
  I've never seen an IT team that couldn't spin up a VM in minutes. I have seen a bunch of teams that weren't allowed to because of ludicrous "change control" practices. Fire the managers that create this state of affairs, not the devops folks, regardless of whether you "go cloud" or not.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Teams are what they DO, not what they CAN DO.
    - marcus0x62 3y ago
      Ok, but I’m not sure what that has to do with what I posted.
  - sofixa 3y ago
    I've met multiple customers where time to get a VM was in the weeks to months. (To be fair, I'm at a vendor that proposed IaC tooling and general workflows and practices to move away from old school ClickOps ticket-based provisioning, so of course we'd get those types of orgs). And more often than not, it had nothing to do with managers, but with individual contributors resisting change because they were set in their ways and were potentially afraid for their jobs. Same applies for firewall changes btw.
sebazzz 3y ago
That time wasting is back in the same form or another. For instance, at my side they enable *all* the Azure Application Gateway, even those rules that Microsoft says not to enable - causing even simple OpenID redirects from Microsoft AzureID (Microsoft login) to the application to get captured in AAG and fail.
jjav 3y ago
> waiting for months to get a VM or a database or a firewall rule because the infrastructure/DBA teams are stuck.. You still have to go through your devops (or equivalent) team to make any network configuration/permission changes. Whether that change is implemented by a local firewall rule or some AWS configuration change is not very important. It's not like you're going to have developers changing AWS access permissions directly. Maybe in a few employee startup, but in any regulated & audited company, you must have separation of duties and audited change control process.

by sofixa 3y ago

MaKey 3y ago

The layer will still be there, because those teams are now managing some cloud infrastructure central to the organization.

nikau 3y ago

It also allows management to hide bad decisions and poor planning. Project is a dud? just nuke the cloud project and no more charges for it. Project is poorly architected and running like a dog? throw more resources at it. Both of the above are harder to hide when you have to order equipment for on prem.

ownagefool 3y ago
If you're running an internal cloud, you can likely absorb that. I think comes down to a couple of things: - Small orgs don't have the resources to run internal clouds, nor should they be doing so. This limits the pipeline of available candidates. - Large orgs promote the wrong people to management, and they make decisions based on their mental model of the world that was developed 20 years ago. They're filled with people who don't understand the difference between cloud and virtualization. - Large consultancies make more money by throwing raw numbers at the problem rather than smart automation. i.e. it's easier for IBM to bill T&M and a whole project wrapper to patch the server than automate it. - Finance & HR teams want you to bend to their ways of working rather than the opposite. Of the rest, you get into many of them are simply in ops because they're less skilled software developers, or they're now being asked to assure security, and that scares them so they try to lock everything down.
yau8edq12i 3y ago
> Project is a dud? just nuke the cloud project and no more charges for it. How is that a negative? Not every project is going to be successful. That's just a basic fact of life. That you don't have to deal with the sunk cost fallacy and just pull the plug is a good thing. > Project is poorly architected and running like a dog? throw more resources at it. Another positive...?! You can continue to serve your clients and maintain a revenue stream while you work on a better architecture. Instead of failing completely. And once you need less ressources, you easily scale down.

sgarland 3y ago

If only that were the case. Even when everything is in IaC and 100% cloud-native, I’ve still seen dev teams bypass the approved methods because ClickOps is easier.

steveBK123 3y ago

If your on-prem team can't spin up a VM same day, then firing them is probably higher ROI than "going to cloud". Further, a lot of the shops "going to cloud" because their infra team is slow.. then hide cloud behind their infra team. A prior 200+ dev shop went from automated on-prem VM builds happening within hours from when you raise a ticket, to cloud where there was a slack channel to nag&beg for an EC2 which could take a day to a week. This was not a temporary state of affairs either, it was allowed to run like this for 2 years+. Oh and, worth mentioning, CTO there LOVED him some Gartner.

marcus0x62 3y ago
I've never seen an IT team that couldn't spin up a VM in minutes. I have seen a bunch of teams that weren't allowed to because of ludicrous "change control" practices. Fire the managers that create this state of affairs, not the devops folks, regardless of whether you "go cloud" or not.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Teams are what they DO, not what they CAN DO.
  - marcus0x62 3y ago
    Ok, but I’m not sure what that has to do with what I posted.
- sofixa 3y ago
  I've met multiple customers where time to get a VM was in the weeks to months. (To be fair, I'm at a vendor that proposed IaC tooling and general workflows and practices to move away from old school ClickOps ticket-based provisioning, so of course we'd get those types of orgs). And more often than not, it had nothing to do with managers, but with individual contributors resisting change because they were set in their ways and were potentially afraid for their jobs. Same applies for firewall changes btw.

sebazzz 3y ago

That time wasting is back in the same form or another. For instance, at my side they enable *all* the Azure Application Gateway, even those rules that Microsoft says not to enable - causing even simple OpenID redirects from Microsoft AzureID (Microsoft login) to the application to get captured in AAG and fail.

jjav 3y ago

> waiting for months to get a VM or a database or a firewall rule because the infrastructure/DBA teams are stuck.. You still have to go through your devops (or equivalent) team to make any network configuration/permission changes. Whether that change is implemented by a local firewall rule or some AWS configuration change is not very important. It's not like you're going to have developers changing AWS access permissions directly. Maybe in a few employee startup, but in any regulated & audited company, you must have separation of duties and audited change control process.