6 things I learnt migrating to the cloud

I’ve had the opportunity over the past 5 years to be involved in many many different cloud migrations of all shapes, sizes and industries. From large-scale lift and shifts, native refactoring and even one or two cloud-to-cloud migrations. There are couple of things I have learnt along the way that appear to remain true irrespective or size, scope or type of organisation. 1. The cloud provider you choose isn’t the best technical fit but the best cultural fit There used to be a trend when organistations were moving to the cloud to ask the question: which cloud provider do we go with? I still occasionally see this in RFPs for big multi-nationals. This lead to a lot of long conversations, commercial modelling, TCO comparisons and contract negotiations. After all of this work (for which we were handsomely paid) you were still left with a fairly long list of trade-offs that you were buying into and the decision was made based on an executive point-of-view associated with levels of comfort with the various risks on the table. Saying the decision was made based on trade-offs and risk is probably being a little kind. The truth in more often the whole exercise is one of confirmation bias to a decision that has already been made. ...

January 14, 2022 · 11 min · liamjbennett