More companies are implementing the cloud in a way that sacrifices the cloud’s biggest benefit: agility. In this blog, we discuss how to maintain agility in cloud computing.
Agile development and cloud computing are intrinsically tied together as solutions are built across modern software delivery, data and analytics, AI, and innovation. Agile, with its emphasis on iterative development and adaptability, has revolutionized how teams approach building systems. Simultaneously, cloud computing has revolutionized infrastructure provisioning, deployment, and management, providing unmatched scalability, flexibility, and collaboration.
However, many organizations take missteps in their cloud deployment, ultimately hindering their team’s ability to work agilely. This can lead to resentment, out-of-control spending, and, ultimately, slow movement and falling behind in the market and against your competitors.
In this blog, you’ll learn more about the relationship between the cloud and agility, how companies lose out on this relationship, and what you need to know to avoid becoming stagnant.
The Cloud and Agility: It’s a Match
The cloud is often touted as having four main benefits: scalability and flexibility, cost efficiency, operational efficiency, and enhanced security.
When paired with agile, it becomes obvious how both are aligned with and strengthened by one another.
1. Scalability and flexibility
The cloud permits you to expand or shrink how much compute and storage you need based on your current circumstances or usage patterns. Agile is built on flexibility and adaptability so teams can quickly react if something changes or goes wrong.
2. Cost efficiency
Because cloud tools are often consumption-based models, you can optimize your environment to only incur costs for what you need when you need it. And because a cloud provider maintains your physical infrastructure, your IT team can remain focused on higher-value activities than traditional maintenance. Due to the speed at which agile is meant to work, reducing technical drag and cost efficiency is also a benefit of using Agile methodology.
3. Operational Efficiency
Agile and DevOps are built on the idea that silos shouldn’t hinder collaboration and should be built on cross-functional teams. With cloud computing, development teams can rapidly deploy new resources to advance their development. At the same time, platform teams can ensure consistency across policy alignment, security and access controls, and cost management standards.
4. Enhanced Security
The cloud is built on a foundation of security, both physical and digital. When configured properly, the cloud can automatically ensure systems align with security standards, controls, and policies. This gives agile teams a safe place to rapidly iterate without compromising security for speed.
Cloud computing provides an environment where Agile principles can thrive, resulting in more efficient and more widely used software. But none of that matters if your cloud deployment takes a wrong turn.
When Agile Isn’t Agile in Cloud Computing
As your company prepares to migrate to the cloud, you might notice a tug-of-war between IT standards and the need for speed.
Often, organizations go one of two ways: rapidly deploying resources into the cloud that later suffer from issues with standardization, security, and out-of-control costs. Or, they swing the other direction and put far too many redundant review and approval layers, or red tape, in place.
Rapidly Deploying Resources
Development groups often make false assumptions about how to take advantage of the cloud’s benefits. Sometimes, this results in an initial struggle with performance issues or difficulty dynamically scaling an application. Poor design decisions can lead to excessive costs when solutions are not designed for the cloud. This struggle is often due to old coding practices that commonly run on overly provisioned physical hardware. Those same practices in the cloud can lead to difficulty in scaling and cost efficiency. Development in the cloud requires skilling up to take advantage of the cloud infrastructure’s design.
Performance issues are often followed by out-of-control costs as companies size up resources to combat them. Cloud providers offer hundreds of different resource types, and choosing the right combination can have a major impact on performance, scalability and even features.
Too Much “Red Tape”
When companies become too strict with the cloud and add inefficient and redundant layers of “review and approve,” these layers become so rigorous that development teams feel as though they cannot benefit from agility at all. Agile deployment is meant to be fast and flexible, removing the siloes in place. That methodology becomes obsolete when teams have to go through inefficient and manual hurdles to deploy resources in the cloud. This often occurs because teams are not properly aligned on process and what permissions they require. There needs to be a balance of ensuring performance, reliability and security can coexist with agility and flexibility.
Start With the Right Foundation for Cloud Agility
To be truly agile in the cloud, you need a strong foundation in place, including proper training, governance policies, cost controls, and security optimized with automation so you can rapidly iterate on top of that foundation.
Here are two tactics you’ll need for cloud performance optimization so you can access the benefits of development agility:
1. Implement Architectural Design
Whether you’re moving too fast with cloud deployment or there’s too much red tape to jump through, architectural design is a critical component that can help.
Proper planning and design are required for not only new applications but also for rehosting or potentially re-platforming existing applications. Planning includes defining your cloud strategy, which should detail your motivators for cloud, which business outcomes you want to achieve, and what key metrics you need to track to report on progress properly. This cloud foundation is critical for success.
This will also include your cloud adoption plan, where you’ll create your initial landing zone architecture, determine security and technical needs, and cost management for the future.
None of this work should stop once you deploy the cloud, however. Application rationalization will also allow you to approach each workload and determine the best architecture and plan when that workload begins the migration or modernization process.
Application rationalization — the process of reviewing applications and workloads across your organization to decide which should be retired, replaced, rearchitected, rehosted, or remain — should be a continuous process by which your team reviews the architecture, size, cost and strategy of the given application or workload.
Taking the time to thoughtfully establish your cloud strategy lays the foundation on which solutions are built. Ongoing rationalization and design guarantee solutions are architected with a solid cloud design while also ensuring development can remain agile in their delivery.
2. Prepare Your Team
Once you know your cloud adoption plan, take the time to define the right roles and responsibilities both during your cloud deployment and once it’s ready for teams to use. Implement the proper security controls and assign eligible permissions based on a role’s responsibility. Also make sure you assign training plans to ensure everyone skills up for their role.
You can create training programs tailored for each team member, their direct job responsibilities, and your organization’s specific environment. This way, once the deployment is ready, your development team will know exactly what they need to do and can continue (or implement) their agile development.
Your training and communication should also, of course, include information about new security protocols, governance and strategies for keeping costs from getting out of control. Documentation and resources will also play a critical role here until the new processes become part of everyone’s everyday routine.
Conclusion: Ensuring Agility in Cloud Computing
Whether they’re moving so fast their developers don’t have time to understand their new environment and cost runs out of control, or they move so slow and implement so many review and approval layers that teams can’t get anything done, companies walk away thinking the cloud can’t do what it’s meant to do.
But that would be a mistake.
Cloud computing has already given us so many opportunities to work more efficiently and effectively. With the right foundation, you can avoid this cloud deployment “gotcha” and ensure your organization is built to compete.
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