The Cloud Decision

For some there may not even be a debate when it comes to the cloud.  The flexibility and scalability that it offers small companies that don't want to build their own datacenter and are not sure about the size of their customer base (their viral coefficient even), is invaluable.  For larger companies the evaluation is generally more difficult.  The primary driver is usually cost, and that savings must be measured against all the other change that's necessary - in security, architecture, and governance to name just a few.  Any good startup (or smaller company) has a strong culture of innovation.  After all that's how startups start.  Innovation is a critical element of the cloud decision making process that too easily gets lost in the evaluation for larger companies.  This, and other value generating endeavors are amplified by a service enabled infrastructure.  Particularly one where self-service is encouraged.

Looking at the cloud decision from the CIO level is just too high.  Doing that is going to dismiss the most significant benefits.  I imagine the typical evaluation goes something like this:

• Cost.  In the cloud we can pay for what we use, and not worry about underutilized assets. Ok, that's a +.
• We'll really need to ramp up security.
• Let's do it!

It may be true that an organization will lower costs by doing just this.  However, there is an enormous amount of lost opportunity in making this move so naively.

If you have an on-premise datacenter you probably have dedicated infrastructure teams.  You've probably also built up processes for development teams to interact with those infrastructure teams. Focusing on cost and ignoring the self-service, service-enabled nature of cloud providers might cause you to reimplement your existing datacenter, architecture, and processes in the cloud, avoiding the majority of the benefits.

Let's take a simple example that I recently heard to illustrate a company that recognized the value of the self-service model and reaped the benefits.  A developer at a larger company supported an existing, cumbersome process to make regularly released files available to external parties.  That process was one where, once her releasable artifact was built, she sent and notified another team of its availability.  At that point the other team would "approve" its release and put it on an external facing FTP site.  The process took several days on average.

In their cloud migration / implementation this developer was empowered to use the available services.  She recognized that the cloud storage solution now available could easily replace the FTP site and the to-be-released artifact could be automatically sent to the storage solution directly from the build process. The net result was an automated, reliable process with immediate results rather than a multi-day lead time.

There are two reasons this succeeded.

1. The developer was intimately familiar with the process.  Enough so such that she could recognize and implement the improvement.
2. There was a conscious decision to empower her; to allow her access to cloud services.  Her organization could have easily restricted access the storage solution such that only the FTP team (or other infrastructure team) had access.

An enormous benefit of moving to the cloud is its service-enabled nature.  Organizations with manual processes and hand-offs have all the opportunity in the world to take advantage of this.  There is a key though.  The true benefit only occurs when there is a reduction in dependencies.  Reduction. In. Dependencies. This must mean that requests are not necessary; that teams can "request" infrastructure via a console or API, on-demand, and not depend on an external entity.  

The on-premise datacenter versus cloud provider decision is a difficult one.  It's one that I do not think should be made lightly, and one that should not be made for cost reasons alone.  Organizations need to make sure they recognize the real benefits and take advantage of them.  This can be a very large change.  In many cases it's a culture change, an architecture change, and a governance change.  Think through what is means to reduce dependencies.  Roles may change, and skill sets may be challenged.  This requires great leadership, trust, and maturity to accomplish successfully.  I'll end with a sobering statistic from VMWare:

63 percent of Amazon AWS projects are considered failed, compared to 57 percent of projects on Rackspace and 44 percent of Microsoft Azure projects.

Single Responsibility Principle 2.0

I see this concept coming back a lot as of late, at least in my ongoing learning and discovery of good design and architecture.  The Single Responsibility Principle is one of the SOLID principles for good object oriented design and development. I think the SRP, and likely many other principles, have become applicable at higher levels of abstraction.

Some amazing advances in approaches to infrastructure and configuration management, deployment, scaling have hit our industry hard in recent years. Historically, before virtual machine technology was really the norm there was still a need and desire to consolidate applications and services to run on a minimal physical footprint.  After all you want to use the hardware that you've purchased effectively. You don't want to run a beefy server at 10% utilization all day, so you load it up to more fully utilize it. This drives a lot of coupling at the infrastructure level of our architectures.

When VM technology became heavily adopted this started to become less of an issue.  You could use the same physical hardware, but host many logical VMs on it.  Thus, you've separated more of the concerns, thereby further decoupling co-hosted applications.  This improves architecture, but trades for increased complexity and load on infrastructure teams.  If we're going to build more single-purpose servers then we'll need more VMs.  This spawned the need for greater automation in the infrastructure space.  Along come tools like Puppet, Chef, SaltStack, and Ansible.  These tools have done an amazing job fulfilling exactly this need.  Write your infrastructure as code, version it, and leverage it for infrastructure, on demand.

We now have tools that enable us to rethink our approach to design and architecture in support of the single responsibility principle.  In the early 2000s when Uncle Bob wrote about the SRP he raised visibility to a concern that we should be asking ourselves as we design and change classes.  It's now 2015 and our tools have advanced incredibly.  We need to ask ourselves this same question as we design all layers of our systems.

How can we leverage the SRP to reduce coupling not just in our classes, but in our application / service design, and in our infrastructure design?  

Modern tools enable, and frankly necessitate, that we ask ourselves this question across our entire stack.  It's really this thinking that drives teams and organizations to microservice architectures.  A class that is designed with a single responsibility changes for one reason and one reason alone.  This keeps classes small, thus easier to change.  Services should be easy to change as well.  What better way than to enable that than to give each its own, single purpose and therefore small, changeable implementation.

I have been particularly interested in Docker lately.  I believe it adds a tremendous amount of value in this space.  Despite great tools like Puppet, Chef, etc., their approach is still bulkier.  With Docker's lightweight VMs the creation of individual service or application images is fast, and spawning them is even faster.  You can start a Docker container just as fast as your service itself can start.  Docker also really shines in its simplistic mechanism for linking together containers for interactions.  If you have a typical web server, app server, database architecture it does not take long to get those pieces Dockerized and running together, linked, in a Docker environment. I really like what Fig did to simplify this even further.

Many of us likely have some work to do to improve our applications and systems in consideration of the SRP.  There won't be any shortage of work there.  The good news is that there is little holding us back when it comes to available tooling.  It's there and most of it is free.  Despite the challenges it seems to me that it's worth giving some thought and moving in that direction.  More easily changed services will yield business agility, and therefore customer satisfaction.