June 21, 2024 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Cloud Transformation
June 21, 2024 at 12:27 pm
The issue of cloud transformation is an important one to me. The organization I work for doesn't really have any cloud presence. During the pandemic, we obviously had to try and make it work, so we spent a month to 6 weeks in lengthy conversations with various Microsoft technical people in an effort to migrate some of our workloads to Azure. However, for some reason(s) I've never understood, because no one will ever talk about it, all those discussions suddenly stopped. I suspect that some of the reason why learning how to move to the cloud came to a halt was because of some managers, like my former supervisor, who recently retired, would repeat loudly and often, the mantra of, "The cloud will ALWAYS take all our money! All cloud providers will nickel and dime you to death!" Those sorts of scare tactics work very well on upper management, for whom any discussion about money scares them above all else.
Steve, I do agree that not all workloads need to go to the cloud. Nevertheless, I do also believe that savings can be achieved, if you migrate some of your workload to the cloud wisely, such as making your apps cloud native. At the time we were trying to move some of our workloads to the cloud it was all and only lift-and-shift. I'm sure that it was primarily because management wanted to get us into the cloud ASAP. But I also think it is because we've never learned how to take an app or database and make it cloud ready. All our apps are monolithic. None of our apps have APIs in them. With only a couple of exceptions, none of the developers know how to write APIs. (I am one of them, but my manager wouldn't let me.)
But now we're in a place where we'll be writing some new apps or modernizing some older ones. I would like some direction on how to make an app cloud native, please. I know that APIs can help with that. And putting some APIs into containers, or maybe App Services in Azure, but that's all I know. What other patterns should I adopt, to make the apps I work on cloud ready?
Rod
June 21, 2024 at 1:36 pm
I'm curious how many DBAs here actually have a say in cloud vs on-prem. My previous company was a fortune 500 and I was on a team of DBAs. The company was mainly on-prem and had such a huge infrastructure that the decision whether to move to the cloud would be made several levels above us. My current company is a global company with several region-specific companies underneath. We are currently going through a very long, winding, to-the-cloud transformation. I have no idea why and from my chair it makes no sense, given our environment. But I was never asked, and I suspect none of the folks in our region was. This decision is coming from the global team. Maybe they have a good reason or maybe not, but if so it has never been communicated down to my level.
June 21, 2024 at 4:14 pm
Rod,
Often involves containerizing, and thinking in terms of always transiting a multi-layer network, not a LAN. That often means ensuring you have retries, timeouts, more tenuous connections. Often it's the same, but not always, so you architect to account for potential issues. This also affects authentication the the fact that your clients might change networks on you, so you need to better understand state and re-establishing connecitons. A lot to it.
In terms of cost, can't help you there. Lots of people avoided too much computing early on because they thought IT would take all their money as well. The cloud is renting stuff, so it's ongoing costs. However, if you monitor, watch, and change how you do things, you can lower costs. However, it's work. Most people don't like work.
June 21, 2024 at 4:17 pm
I'm curious how many DBAs here actually have a say in cloud vs on-prem. My previous company was a fortune 500 and I was on a team of DBAs. The company was mainly on-prem and had such a huge infrastructure that the decision whether to move to the cloud would be made several levels above us. My current company is a global company with several region-specific companies underneath. We are currently going through a very long, winding, to-the-cloud transformation. I have no idea why and from my chair it makes no sense, given our environment. But I was never asked, and I suspect none of the folks in our region was. This decision is coming from the global team. Maybe they have a good reason or maybe not, but if so it has never been communicated down to my level.
I think you always have a say. You have an opinion and influence. However, most people think that means a vote. Or that if they don't win with their vote, they never had a vote.
Votes and influence as a piece of the decision, but no the decision. Learn to give an informed opinion, weigh in on the pros cons, and accept that the final decision might not be in agreement with what you think. Most of these decisions, even for a single app, are complex. There are lots of views and opinions, and someone ultimately has to boil those down to yes or no (or go left or right).
Be gracious and understanding while winning and losing. Lots of times companies haven't listened to me and I accept that. I move on and continue to try and influence the direction based on what I think works best, and I also go along with the decision and support it as best I can.
June 22, 2024 at 1:08 am
Thank you, Steve, for the link!! Now I've got something to read and begin thinking about how to use it in my career.
Rod
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