Serverless is coming to a close. It was a valuable vehicle for describing what emerged, but it needs to be retired to an IT glossary. A modern cloud evolutionary journey has overtaken it, and the term modern cloud theory supplants it. Modern cloud captures the need to balance tech capabilities with business strategy needs.
How does the modern cloud affect internal stakeholders?
It’s interesting to think about the Modern Cloud through the perspectives of the four personas. As technical people, we go straight to the services, products, and techniques we believe are significant. However, you must remember that the Modern Cloud must represent value for different personas across the business. The customer is an obvious one, but it’s good to talk about internal stakeholders. The CEO and Product personas are fascinating. We happily talked about the Developer and CTO/Architect perspectives. They are our personas!
Wardley Mapping guides us toward our users and their needs. Having those conversations and distilling them down helps us with our thinking and articulates the benefits. What are the excellent approaches to realise the potential of modern cloud ecosystems? It’s been helpful to talk and clarify the mental model of the cloud and what it can be, as well as what benefits teams and organisations following this path can get from it.
The value proposition
When discussing the cloud, we thought about building ephemeral event-driven architecture. But our CEO was thinking, can you be faster and cheaper? It became a value proposition. Remembering some of those things is essential! You need to keep that commercial lens as you design applications and processes. And as you build up teams. One interesting thing (we’ve been discussing it for a long time) is the term ‘serverless’. We have done a lot of work on the concept of serverless first. And it’s a strong strategy. It’s potent. But the serverless term itself needs to be revised. One of the reasons why we use the term modern cloud is because when people hear the word Serverless, they think of Lambda. But it’s much more than that.
Lambda was the first ‘go-to’ for ephemeral event-driven or function-based workloads, and it’s been fantastic. However, the ecosystem has evolved, with managed services becoming available and direct integration between managed services. So you don’t need as much glue! You don’t need to worry about operational burden or code liability. You can offload that to the cloud provider and the services.
Serverless is coming to a close.
Serverless is coming to a close. It was a helpful vehicle to describe what emerged, but it has evolved. Now, the term modern cloud supplants it.
Serverless exists within the IT org. When we initially thought about solutions, you looked at a container or going on to lambda. But as we say, it has expanded since then. The industry has been having the same debate. And the industry has been rolling out serverless for ten years. It has stopped being an argument over serverless versus containers. With the modern cloud, you are working with Product and Business. And you need to start talking in the language of capabilities. You must develop a ubiquitous language about building blocks to describe getting capability into production. We know what the modern cloud has under the hood. But we have to evolve to talk in business terms. Pick capabilities over all else, and stop talking about Lambda!
The well-architected approach helps frame it. Is it secure and operationally excellent? Have you checked that it is performant and reliable? Is it cost-optimised and sustainable? Those capability conversations are supplanting the discussions on whether or not to use serverless.
The paradigm shift caused by modern cloud theory.
That’s a paradigm shift that people need to discuss, even from teams using the modern cloud approach. A term that we use in ‘The Value Flywheel Effect‘ is’ long-term value’. We also talk about well-architected. Because we defer ops and maintenance to the client, our solutions are more cost-effective without doing anything. They’re also more secure, robust, and performant. You don’t hear about that massive benefit.
There’s a mindset change required. The penny dropped for us years ago. A lot of people think that Lambda was the first serverless service. It was S3 storage, which was two services before that. It caused a significant difference. When people started using S3, they had a change in mindset. What blew my mind was the chaining or eventing of things. You no longer considered it a call stack, where you go down a stack and back up again. You always put that in as a false constraint in the early days. Now you could say, ‘If this, then do that’ and trigger different things. It is an entirely different way of thinking.
A modern cloud is similar to a way of thinking where things trigger other things. So, you have a different abstraction layer.
Modern cloud versus legacy cloud
Another thing we have been thinking about is the modern cloud versus the legacy cloud. Legacy cloud is the traditional call stack in the cloud. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s going to be running hot all the time. It’s just stuff that should be in your data centre, but it’s now in the cloud. For anyone, it’s quite a challenging question. But many people look back at their traditional stack and suddenly realise it’s a legacy monolith in the cloud.
You do not have the advantages of loose coupling, elasticity, global scaling, or space renovation. Adopting any new modern cloud features requires a lot of work.
Many people think transformation ends with moving to the cloud. But transformation starts with moving! You need to start with the legacy cloud. Then, you need to measure and start modernising. Many people need to catch up on that point.
That’s a critical phase. We could devote a whole Serverless Craic episode to it! Moving from that mindset into an organisation that can embrace what we’re talking about requires time and adjustment.
The value flywheel effect
About the modern cloud, there’s a way to organise yourself within the cloud to allow you to operate that way. And it takes time. It’s slow, to begin with. But as you progress, the momentum builds. And before you know it, you’re up and running. It’s the value flywheel effect. We’ve experienced it in a couple of orgs. And we’re going through that process again. But we can already see it starting to pick up. Over the longer term, it makes complete sense.
Once you have migrated to the cloud, you have got to keep evolving. Wardley mapping helps to identify what needs to continue to grow into a commodity. People think if they’re in the cloud, they can stop innovating, evolving, and leveraging new capabilities, But then they need to catch up. Your flywheel is not turning anymore. And you’re not evolving for the future.
The balance between those two things is essential. Your technical strategy has evolved by moving to the cloud, but now you need to think about your business strategy and what’s required for the business. The interaction between those things is crucial. That is the flywheel effect that we talk about in our book.
Do you know the Purpose of what you’re doing? Do you have your North Star? Challenged: do you have the right environment and capability to do what you need to do? Next best action: do you have good developer experience/serverless first approach? Where can you offload work to the provider? Long-term value: you’re bringing in well-architected sustainability. And then you’re away again with Purpose!
That’s what ‘The Value Flywheel Effect book is about.
Can you deliver on your tech promises?
You are disadvantaged if you have yet to embrace modern cloud concepts. You may get the investment to move to the cloud. But when the business comes along and asks for more things, and you respond by saying: “Oh, hang on, we’re still trying to fix this old thing up”, you’re going to hit a blocker. You may get a very frustrated business stakeholder who has spent money to move. But they can’t get the things that you promised. Because you’re slower than you need to be, or you’re not as cheap. And you can’t do as many new things as you promised.
It’s about keeping the ‘time to value’ low and sustainable now and into the future and being responsive to the business’s needs. At the start of this episode, we talked about users and their needs and the four personas. If you can’t meet those needs, they’re going to find somebody who can, or they’re going to find a provider who can.
It’s like a proverb: the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago. The next best time is now! When you make that switch, it is difficult to know where to start. The transition from the legacy cloud to the modern cloud is iterative. You start on smaller and tighter workloads or operations. Then, you build on it and expand it. You can start from that single account.
But over a couple of years, you embrace your multi-account strategy. You’ve got processes. And you’ve developed your capabilities, and your developer experience is frictionless. You’ve gone down a route where you can react to business demand and need much more quickly. Everyone’s in a much better situation regarding developer happiness, developer recruitment, engineering, product, and business.
Developer’s search for meaning
After the pandemic, people are searching for purpose and more meaningful jobs and existence. If you have leveraged all the things we’ve talked about and positioned yourself in the modern cloud, it will be a happier, more meaningful place to work. You are focused on users and their needs, and you have a good purpose that’s well articulated.
People know what good is. It’s starting to permeate the industry and become a differentiator for people looking for their next career.
There you have it! Modern Cloud. There’s no time like the present. Go out today and plant your tree. Sort out your developer experience.
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