Why I Wrote This Book

For this book to have any value, it must provide information in a candid way and not hold back on issues that many editors and book publishers would find a bit risky. For example, discussing the real value of cloud computing regardless of how the larger cloud providers now define it. Or, looking at the claims of sustainability in the cloud computing and technology markets, and letting you know the current expectations and core benefits with comparisons to what we’re seeing in real-world projects.

This book’s primary purpose is to provide the positive realities of what cloud technology can bring to today’s enterprises and to reveal some often-unexpected downsides. The surprises tend to happen when organizations approach cloud computing incorrectly, or when the public cloud providers themselves don’t have a good handle on how their clients should leverage their technology.

The misuse of and misinformation about cloud computing technology are the two most common problems. Yes, the technology does have value, but what you use and how it’s used determine its value. Every day we learn more about what works, what doesn’t, and how to make sure cloud computing works best for an enterprise. Cloud providers, technology providers, and those charged with selecting and configuring this technology must work together. It’s also good to know if and where your providers themselves might still have some blind spots.

What struck me about the cloud computing market in general is that the billions of dollars spent on cloud marketing seems to spin cloud technology as something that can’t fail. Marketing has a big impact on how organizations leverage the technology. It can also obscure some important information if potential clients don’t know the right questions to ask prior to selecting cloud providers or cloud technology. And yet, how can you get the answers if you don’t know the questions to ask?

This lack of knowledge leads to a few probable outcomes:

First, and the most helpful thing that could occur, would be failure. Although nobody likes to fail, at least we understand that what we did was wrong, and we back up to try a different approach with another cloud technology selection and configuration. Although this effort costs time and money, if you apply the lessons learned, the movement to the correct, near-optimized solution will be a win.

Second, and the most negative of these outcomes, is to select a cloud technology solution that’s underoptimized. It costs way more than it should and does not bring the ultimate business value back to the enterprise. The issue here is that the solution works, which is the only metric that many cloud architects and developers use to measure their success. It doesn’t seem to matter that it costs the enterprise up to a half a billion dollars in lost revenue. Who has the knowledge to consider the cost savings of a near-optimized configuration and the business value that ultimately gets left on the table with an underoptimized system? I would strongly question the opinions of the cloud architects and developers who installed and still believe that their underoptimized system “works.”

More often, underoptimized situations go undetected. The bad solution continues to hurt the business ongoing. Chances are that you have an underoptimized example in your own career. If you don’t, reading this book will help keep you in that rare air.

The outcome of trial and error is success. A success on the first try requires selection of the right technology with a configuration that gets as close as possible to full optimization, in terms of cost efficiency and value that’s returned to the business. Luck doesn’t get you there. It’s a matter of being open-minded from the very beginning of a cloud project. What is most likely to work best for a particular project, given the requirements and current state of the technology? Look beyond the hype and noise to see what the technology can do as well as what it can’t do.

Cloud migration and/or development projects are not considered fully successful unless they approach optimized efficiency and return optimal value to the business. That criterion makes fully successful projects rare. Not because they are hard to do, but because of existing biases, and a lack of related experiences and skills. In other words, few cloud architects and developers can see beyond the hype, misinformation, and what’s popular to make potentially unpopular decisions, even if they’re the right ones.

How to Read This Book

If the chapter topics seem to jump around a bit, that’s on purpose. So many secrets exist around the use of cloud technology that they can’t be organized into neat categories. This book organizes what I think is important to understand about the cloud computing industry into chapters that obviously go together. These chapters include knowledge and information that we see lead to successful cloud projects.

Other chapters are decoupled from the theme of the previous chapter or the ones that follow, but they build on information introduced in previous chapters and present new information on an obscured or “secret” topic. These chapters include secrets of cloud computing that most people in the industry are not willing to share.

Thus, although we talk about cloud storage and cloud computing services in the first few chapters, which are both considered foundational infrastructure services, we move quickly to more advanced cloud services such as artificial intelligence and machine learning that seem to dominate today’s technology press. Then, we talk about other trends such as multicloud, and how enterprises are failing and succeeding with those technology configurations. We include what’s being hyped and what works, which are two very different things.

Next, we get into a few cloud topics that seem to be making technology press headlines: cloud’s ability to support sustainability and to reduce our carbon footprint and more. Finally, we discuss the likely future of cloud computing. Here we focus on what’s most likely to occur versus what is predicted.

We end with a discussion of skills: how to find them and how to build your own. To build net-new cloud-based systems, it’s critical that project leaders know how and where to build new skill sets into the enterprise, as well as how to find, attract, and keep the right skills. We also look at how to manage your own skills to become someone with talents that enterprises will pay top dollar to attract and/or retain.

What Benefits Can You Expect?

The core benefit to reading this book is that you’ll be “in the know” about things that most of the cloud providers, technology vendors, consultants, and other players would rather you not know. Armed with this information, you’ll be able to ask specific questions around the use and cost of the technology under consideration and many other factors to question that you’ll learn about here.

To use a very simple example, let’s say a new business will soon launch and you’re in charge of finding a system to manage inventory. You want to determine the specific type of cloud storage that will best support a new inventory system for the enterprise’s possibly unique type of inventory. You need to consider different types of storage, such as object, block, and file storage, and understand the implications of how each operate as well as the different price points of each. Moreover, you need to understand how particulars such as deals for goods can be obtained when the enterprise buys ahead of need, and when this will likely work to the enterprise’s benefit and when it will not.

There will also be opportunities and challenges with cloud heterogeneity. Multicloud provides you with the ability to select best-of-breed technology and services. However, the price of this choice is complexity. The number of different system types and brands that you must operate over the years to come will require different skill sets and interfaces.

The complexity of it all becomes the challenge. Always keep an eye on the number of moving parts and configurations required to become successful. Determining the best balance of choice and complexity for each project, as well as for the enterprise, will result in a near-optimized system that brings the most value to the business.

Information presented in this book will not tell you exactly what to do step by step, one-size-fits-all. It will arm you with the right knowledge to make your ventures into the world of cloud computing more likely to succeed.