Serverless Craic Ep32 The Second Cloud Transformation

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

What is the Second Cloud Transformation?

In this episode we are talking about the second cloud transformation. A lot of people are talking about what happens when you get to the cloud? You have already moved to the cloud. But you are not achieving the cloud successes like being event driven or serverless.

It can be a surprise for organisations that work in traditional ways. Their frame of reference is all on premise like big data centres or new mainframe stuff. So this new paradigm causes uncertainty around what can be done. What does a good cloud solution look like? There's a learning curve that people need to climb and to become more comfortable.

When companies move to the cloud, it's usually part of a transformation. But the reason why we call it 'The Second Cloud Transformation' is because there's another step change. The best person I heard describe this is Shaun Braun from 3M. He did a keynote at AWS re:Invent in 2021. He talked about people moving to the cloud and measuring data. And then they transform by shutting things down and redoing other things.

Enterprises and people from mature companies are struggling. They are in the cloud but having problems with account creation, observability, security or how to deploy or provision things. There are infrastructure things that they haven't done. Because they haven't modernised. Sometimes the move to the cloud happens quickly. People have not been left behind. But they've been focusing on other things and they haven't gone back to first principles. To rethink how the software capabilities work.

You need to move away from big upfront design. And shift design, decision making and architectural decision making onto the teams. Because they're the ones who know the business problem and business aims best. But you have got to encourage experimentation in a safe way. A good enabler for that is thinking about and setting up policies for the services you want to start leveraging out of the box.

In the second phase of The Value Flywheel Effect you map out your capability. So you do need to have an honest assessment of the capabilities you have and the teams in the organisation. Because maybe the engineers don't understand security. At least then you know that you've got to level people up. 'Shift left' is a great mechanism, because your teams have to do more and there's going to be gaps. So in some ways the second cloud transformation is filling those gaps.

We talk about asking the question: 'what does good look like?' One of the best books to answer that question is 'Accelerate' by Nicole Forsgren.In the book there are four key metrics for building and scaling high performance technology organisations. Another go to book for this particular topic is 'Reaching Cloud Velocity', by Jonathan Allen. How to spin up new teams and the mitosis approach? It's a phenomenally good reference, similar to 'Accelerate'. And we reference both those books in our book 'The Value Flywheel Effect' which is available for preorder!

When you get into the cloud you need to enable real transformation! This is what we are calling the second cloud transformation.

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