Infra Folks, shouldn’t we change our approach with Public Cloud

All of us are familiar with below picture and can easily describe the IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Are we thinking about how it is changing our way of working? It is affecting both Infra and App team as both the teams need to think about each other’s territories especially when somebody need to build DevOps culture.

It is gone those days we just don’t care about any application or functionality what is running on the servers that we built. We used to provide number of servers based on the sizing and design. We did not have to know what functionality the application would perform or roles as well.

You can continue with the above if you are still thinking of riding on IaaS (Infrastructure As A Services) but not with PaaS (Platform As A Services) and SaaS (Software As A Services). Infrastructure team has little things to do now as most of those tasks will be performed by your Cloud Service Provider.

Everybody talks about serverless computing even though, there is none at the backend 😊. We should be able to think about moving away from monolithic architectures, moving to microservices and containerize wherever possible.

Infrastructure team who is responsible to support the Public Cloud need to have application focused approach so that they, along with core application team can analyses the existing application environment then propose IaaS, PaaS and SaaS based solution to replace those functionalities. We should (Companies wants to) use SaaS and PaaS then IaaS only if it is inevitable to have VMs stood up.

It is really challenging to run along with changes every Public Cloud provider are making. It is not only a challenge for you but also for your IT service organizations as well to add those into their supportable bucket list. We need to shift our strategy and approaches to make our services attractive package because customers do not want to separate their apps and infrastructure now a days. We need to bring both App and Infra team together and upskill each other’s to bring app and infra combined approach. This way both the teams can work together complementing each other’s for winning the contracts as one single team.

It is important that we do not miss security. You should also be able to think about the security at every level as the speed of DevOps demands that. So, you must think about DevSecOps in your journey. It is important to have flexibility but require foolproof RBAC policy to allow the dev team to get great control on these deployments to make swift changes. Most of the clients have very good Cloud strategy, they are making 100s of changes every month but they were able to make only few changes in every quarter. So the service providers also need to step up and guide them on accelerating their development. IT services provider should be able add value to their client by identifying and helping them with ‘ need of the hours’ and prepare them for the future.

Infra team should come up with monitoring and management strategy more of plug and play as it may not be easy to make engineering changes along with Cloud Service changes. We should be able to support those frequent changes with lesser changes in our code and shorter time frame. We should try to leverage what is available versus need to go for lot of engineering every time which is likely to fail. I am sure the speed and competition among the large cloud players are going to increase.

Try out a strategy like Crowd-sourcing at large level to ensure that we can make those changes immediately or work with your service provider to develop those even before it is GA. It is not that easy to catch up with all the services available there. So, what can we do? Run.. Run..

This is where you must show your smartness to sense the need of the hour. You identify commonly or going to be used services by working with application team. You create you own reference architectures to identify the required PaaS and SaaS services (the usual suspects). You work with sales team to understand the market demand (to be wanted). If you could target few services which are more demanding can be targeted. You probably bring some grading on those services like most wanted, commonly used, wanted but less demand so that you can prioritize your items which require close watch and faster integrations.  Importantly, work with Cloud Providers so closely to pick up those updates earlier than their releases and a thoughtful leader who do not think that we are selling iPhones. 

Gear up guys, we have lot to learn, Run … Run like T-REX!!!