How can you be a good Cloud Leader in the Modern Cloud? We look at Capability, Speed, and Flexibility and how each applies to your Engineering and Product Teams.
We’re continuing our series on Modern Cloud. Last time, we gave an intro on Modern Cloud. Our following articles explore different personas or people who deliver Modern Cloud. The first one, and the most important one, is the CEO. What does a CEO expect from Modern Cloud? They want capability from your engineering or IT organisation. They also want speed. And flexibility. Would you agree with those three high-level buckets?
Modern Cloud Capability:
We’re talking about building out business capabilities and meeting the customers’ demands. In a previous article, we spoke about Wardley Maps and being able to assess where you are concerning maturity. You must identify opportunities, look at evolutionary paths, and consider new capabilities.
As a Modern CEO, you’re going to have your customers’ needs in your mind. You’re going to have user group needs for your company to meet. You look at Modern Cloud and think, how can I rapidly meet the needs of those customers or users? What capabilities does Modern Cloud provide me with? CEOs are looking to Modern Cloud to stand up capabilities to meet those needs quickly.
When moving and transitioning to the modern cloud, you must shake yourself out of building everything from the ground up. Particularly in emerging areas, like machine learning or AI, you may own an AML stack or want to train our models. But really, you need to think: ‘Is there a service that already does it?’. Could we get it off the shelf? It would be best if you got into the habit of looking at what exists. A big part of the Modern Cloud aims to integrate with existing things.
Let’s not build it. Let’s not start way back with nothing and work our way up. Instead, what can we do now?
Buy, Rent, Build?
It’s the Buy, Rent, Build question! In our experience, Modern CEOs are obsessed with the customer in the business domain that they’re in. They’re very focused on that industry. The healthy question is: ‘Why are we building that?’. Why are we building that thing if it has nothing to do with our core business? There’s a value chain that you can draw. If you’re a responsible technical lead, you must think that we don’t need to build some of those things when you can buy or rent. You can rent a lot more in the modern cloud because that allows you to change and switch. You have high rental power. You’re not buying things that lock you in and not building things that lock you in.
SaaS capabilities:
You need to apply a Modern Cloud lens to the ‘software as a service’ capabilities you’re renting so you don’t build on legacy cloud. We’ve seen many so-called SaaS offerings that don’t pay as you go, don’t scale up or down, and come with a lot of operational overhead and burden. As we evolve towards a modern cloud and a serverless first mindset approach, we must assess the SaaS offerings we want to rent to see if the provider has built them using modern cloud principles and practices.
Otherwise, you will tie yourself into knots with things that will not scale. Suppose your architecture and solution fully leverage the modern cloud and are fully serverless with the flexibility and elasticity of scaling up and down. In that case, the integration points with SaaS services won’t be able to handle that, and you will pay a price later.
We remember a CEO once telling a story that compared engineering to a janitor. You just want things to be clean, and you don’t want to see them. But now, engineering is a differentiator. There’s an appreciation that the modern cloud can drive your business. It’s not just a cost centre. If your company has a modern cloud attitude, engineering is part of the business. You should not confine engineers to the IT department. If you stick everything in the IT department and treat it like a black box, you might be doing modern cloud, but you’re not getting the commercial benefits from bringing the tech potential to your business leaders.
It’s about effectively integrating and preparing.
Cloud Architects become Specialists.
Modern Cloud and Speed
Everything is about integration! The next one is Speed. We’ve talked previously about ‘Time To Value’. It’s different from how fast the developer can type in the code. It’s the value stream from an idea to how quickly that makes it into the hands of the customers. That’s not just IT. It’s the whole org from front to back. And, in the modern cloud, you can speed that up.
You should be able to go from ideation, discovery, and framing to production and into the hands of a real customer and deliver value in days, if not hours. There’s a nirvana point where you’re having discovery and framing sessions with the business and your end users, and you’re showing them prototypes in natural production environments that you have toggled appropriately so that you are not exposing them to the existing customer base.
The value flywheel effect
There is a value flywheel effect here! But if the flywheel gets stuck and you’re spending ages iterating, there’s inertia and stoppage. When you start executing quickly, the Product Team realises it can ask for things quickly. The flywheel begins to turn. And then you get to a point where you can sit, and both ideate into production quickly. That’s the nirvana spot, but you need to prove that you can go fast first, and Modern Cloud helps you to go fast.
Modern CEOs expect their teams to have a significant change frequency and be able to do A/B tests in a reliable way that maintains reliability and stability and gives good customer feedback. We talk about ‘slow is smooth and smooth is fast’, well-architected, and the importance of teams that work with a degree of rigour. So, we have the mechanisms in place to facilitate moving with speed, safely, and productively. CEOs should invest in their engineering, their development, and their organisation to be able to think in those terms.
Who are you building for?
As an engineer, you’re not building for the engineering manager. You’re building a product for the company. You need to burst that bubble! You can make stuff quickly if you have a fantastic capability, but People have yet to learn about it. But you still need help in safe trains going slower than possible for the customer.
There’s a Simon Wardley thread relating to this. The essence is that teams who adopt modern, well-architected practices find it easier to learn the business than the business trying to understand IT!
That’s fair enough! You don’t hire financial experts to teach you finance. You make them do finance when you work with them. The third item is flexibility. There are a couple of different ways to think about this: pivoting a line of business or scaling in other ways or different global locations.
Modern Cloud Flexibility
If you leverage modern capabilities, you’re not worrying about a lot of upfront investment. You’re not an outlying capital expenditure. Your software features and capabilities are operational expenses. It’s not OpEx versus CapEx.
You’re not worried about cost, making it hard to pivot and change. Because you’re not betting your credibility on a $50 million data centre you’ve just purchased, you have to make it work. You’re able to do ‘safe to fail’ experiments in a rapid fashion, as we talked about with Speed. Your feedback loop is a lot tighter.
If it isn’t working out for the business or if you’re pursuing a value stream or product offering that’s working out, that’s okay because you haven’t sunk millions into it. You can rapidly pivot into something more valuable and may have more impact. You can pivot more efficiently and effectively to find that product/market fit. From a CEO’s point of view, they want lots of options and don’t want to go through one-way doors. They want two-way doors. So, if it doesn’t work out, they can return and try something else.
Sunk cost fallacy.
There’s another aspect to the sunk cost fallacy. With a data centre migration, which is effectively a re-host, moving from a server into straight instances, and you now have a legacy cloud, you will have spent a lot of time and effort to stand on that up. So, a bubble forms where you believe you will spend more for a while, but then the spending will go down. But the spend never really goes down. You find yourself in a situation a few years after migration where you spend lots of money but can’t move fast.
All we’ve got is a fancy data centre, as Gregor Hohpe says. You need to re-architecture or modernise as part of the migration or just after the migration. A lot of people don’t do that. You don’t have the flexibility because you are stuck in one region or stuck on an old stack.
From a people’s point of view, if you’re moving at speed and leveraging capabilities appropriately, your people are freed up for differentiating work and working on things that you can pivot towards. They’re not trying to work their way through lots and lots of different changes.
Implications for Data
There are data implications as well. Organisations that embrace the modern cloud can leverage data capabilities and expand into new products, ventures, or experimentation. They don’t fixate on yesterday’s success. They’ve got their heads on a swivel, looking for that next opportunity. They’re constantly looking for ways to leverage what they have to penetrate those spaces. It’s a radical target for orgs that embrace the successful modern cloud.
Not worrying about scale is critical. You don’t know what’s going to take off. If you put many experiments out there, something may have the right product/market fit and then must scale massively. If you’ve leveraged the modern cloud efficiently, you’ve checked limits ensured, set portals correctly, and that resources are appropriate for that account. You are good to go. That wouldn’t be the case if you’re on legacy cloud or on-premise.
Conclusion
With the modern cloud, you’re likely event-driven, using stream-based and more managed services. You are not fine-tuning at lower levels. You have the elasticity and are event-driven to respond to change. That’s hard to do if you haven’t used modern cloud techniques.
Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect
Follow us on X @ServerlessEdge and LinkedIn