Dancing in the Cloud

I mentioned in my previous post that there are only five reasons to move to the cloud. Number one on that list is flexibility.

(Image generated as usual by DALL-E-2)

Everyone tells you the cloud will give us a lot of flexibility; that you can dance there in a way it cannot do on-premise (and not just because you’re a paunchy middle-aged man). Scale up, scale down, clone, snapshot, change your mind whenever you like, no long-term contracts, no fear of irrevocable errors — flexibility, what’s not to love? While you’re getting caught up in all the sexiness though, it is important to ask one key question.

Why can’t your elephants dance? (By this, I mean to ask, of course, why your on-premise is not flexible -no actual elephants are involved)

It’s not a trivial question. For a while now, most enterprises have virtualised infrastructure not very dissimilar from the cloud, and hence many of the technological barriers to flexibility (attached storage disks, physical servers etc) have long since been demolished. Most have invested in tools that allow for big phrases like “single pane of glass” or “intelligent management”. Yet we pursue flexibility elsewhere?

This is what my experience has been…

Buying Beware

A huge reason for on-premise inflexibility is the way we buy IT capacity.

First, there’s the whole procurement process — usually involving committees and operating processes that stretch into the far horizon. Companies talk big about smart and agile and whatnot but let's face it, procurement processes are largely about paperwork and price negotiation. As for agility, let's say this; I’m proudly touching toes against other middle-aged men whilst studiously ignoring the effortless backflips of my teenage niece.

On the cloud suddenly I face no contracts, no long-term commitments, simple, immutable terms and conditions — maybe I should be doing those backflips. And don’t talk to me about sticker shock; I used to have international roaming on my mobile before Airtel offered packages.

Frustratingly, I’ve seen company after company make procurement harder thus pushing people into the clouds as a bypass. We keep making fun of how badly the government buys anything, yet we keep emulating the same exact things. A bit of an Indian phenomenon too — globally, procurements are faster, easier and often driven by rate contracts. CIOs will take flexibility where they can get it but it would serve companies much better to fix the needless rigidities on ground.

Second, IT capacity is traditionally purchased against specific budgets provided either under a project or against a division or line of business. This capacity is then “owned” by the owner of that budget, and woe betides anyone trying to cross this Laxmanrekha and use even an inch of it anywhere else. The consequence is inflexible pools of unused resources even while there are shortages elsewhere, not to mention all the costs incurred defending the (quite thoroughly virtual) fences. It's not unusual to find a virtual platform hard-sliced into many many smaller virtual pools which are then managed as individual universes. And because of issue number one (long procurement cycles), hoarding rather than scrounging is the norm — getting the size wrong means starving for months waiting for fresh supply.

The cloud rather conveniently makes these things flexible — no capacity lock-ins, no restrictions on reducing or increasing, no Laxmans to complicate things, no owners to press ownership, what’s not to like?

I’ve seen a few small fixes help — for instance, buying capacity overall under a CIO budget collated across the company and then charged back to projects usually leads to better utilization and less wastage (plus, the CIO is a convenient single neck responsible for aggregate capacity). Also, in today’s world, it is not very efficient to manually assign and manage capacity — better to go the cloud way and create a single large pool which is then parcelled off dynamically based on need.

Worst of all is if you move to the cloud but maintain the fixed allocations and rigid boundaries. Yes, you can do it if you want and unfortunately, many people do indeed want. A verticalised business structure leads to a verticalised and inflexible IT setup, regardless of technology, elephants or clouds.

Heroes of the Dark

A big driver of flexibility on the cloud is the ability to see what's going on — while enterprise CIOs stumble about their infrastructure like a blind man with a stick, teenagers are doing an eyes-wide-open Simon Biles on the cloud.

What do I mean by this? Traditionally, we of the doddering legacy systems world are used to monitoring only a few things about our infrastructure and leaving the rest to the many gods India is blessed with. We do CPU, we do memory, maybe some network, a bit of storage (only utilization, usually) and well, nothing much more. This is partly because not that much was available when we were growing up, and partly because we were too busy buying to do the running. Review of on-premise infrastructure is rarely continuous; even weekly or monthly is rare — corrective actions are therefore similarly slow. Thresholds are generous and hitting them initiates SOPs that take days or weeks to execute.

The cloud, on the other hand, came from the e-commerce world where every tiny inch of everything was monitored — which application sneezed in the last four seconds, which one acts funny every Saturday, who is pushing how hard on the network, and so on. Cloud natives are used to seeing things in (near) real-time and then using that vision to jump about in similarly short timeframes, usually automatically.

What kind of jumping about? Auto-scaling for load management (up and down). Resilience and failure recovery in minutes. Reallocation of capacity in hours. Bandwidth optimization in real-time. Adjusting dynamically to external failure incidents. A technology system that feels living and responsive, not lying on the couch playing dead.

Yes, you can get this on-premise too, through free tools like Nagios, Prometheus or ELK, alternately by shelling out for the incredible more details provided by Solarwinds, Dynatrace, Appdynamics and the like. Automation tools — today’s virtualization setups all offer competent options. The cloud provides still more — many events that can be trapped and monitored and automated and acted upon (including billing events that prevent sticker shock).

The trick, of course, is to use this information. IT has managed operations in a slow, plodding way for decades; it takes a very different operations structure (and lots of automation) to really use all this information to any benefit. Otherwise, well, you get really nice dashboards and all the flexibility of a blind man in a movie theatre.

Don’t underestimate the inertia to change; I’ve personally found it very hard to convince traditional IT operations setups to change their ways even while startups run rings around us. A pervasive distrust of automation, manual processes that no one wants to rethink, generous layers of approvals for each action, no understanding of the new tools, all make for a high inflexibility on-premise.

Worse, companies when moving to the cloud move the same practices instead of rethinking what's possible — so you pay for a teenage gymnast and get a geriatric cloud setup.

Bend it like Beckham

The biggest attraction of the cloud’s flexibility is that it comes pre-digested and fully tested, on tap at the tap of a keyboard. No pesky utilities to implement, no complicated processes to navigate, no integration tangles to unwind. However, it can lead to a few challenges. The obvious one is sticker shock — overdoing this can be quite costly.

There’s one greater danger — rushing into a flexible world with rigid people and processes and a poor understanding of how to extract the benefits. The cloud merely offers the tools of flexibility — it does not magically make you flexible. Promise needs work and some very open eyes to convert into reality.

Do become cloud-native — taking benefit of all the new technology on offer. If you are able to extract value, it becomes a question of deciding where the best price-performance is — on-premise or cloud. Otherwise, you’re going to the cloud on a fad; wearing the same sunglasses as Tom Cruise hasn’t landed me any movie offers.