InfoWorld recently wrote about a Citrix study showing accelerating “cloud repatriation,” meaning companies are leaving the cloud to move back to on-premise or more personally managed datacenters. The public cloud is the right choice for most companies and situations, but it’s often embraced without a real plan.
Here are some mistakes that companies make in the cloud. If you’re not yet in the cloud you should carefully consider how to avoid them. If you’re in the cloud already they can help keep, or get, things on track.
Mistake #1: Choosing the Wrong Cloud
Cloud Choice – You can run almost anything in any of the major clouds, but one will likely be better than the others for your specific needs. Multi-cloud is an option, but it can often be spelled multi-headache.
Mistake #2: Not Putting Up Guardrails
Guardrails – It’s easy to get distracted by all the offerings in the cloud. Before you know it, you have as many different solutions as problems. This leads to security issues, tech debt, out-of-control costs, and sprawl. Use IaC, plan your stacks, and put controls in place to enforce good practices.
Mistake #3: Not Keeping an Eye on Costs
Cost Monitoring – This is a huge issue. Part of the reason you want to use the cloud is to get granular cost controls. But, just as you can save money by only building what you need, you can also build whatever you want and waste money. Keep an eye on your costs, gate your builds, and keep infrastructure costs in your project planning.
Mistake #4: Thinking One Size Fits All
One Size Doesn’t Fit All – Cloud solutions have to meet a huge variety of requirements. This can make them excessively complicated. Sometimes, the right choice is to use something other than the cloud offering and select a third-party or in-house solution to a problem. Monitoring is a great example. The native offerings are okay, but you’re usually better off with a more dedicated solution.
Mistake #5: Overcommitting to Serverless
Serverless Isn’t a Panacea – It’s tempting to throw out the VMs and put everything into serverless solutions. Many organizations are surprised when they see how much complexity these solutions can add, the costs they can accrue, and their inherent loss of control. They can be a great choice, but consider the whole picture before diving too deep.
Mistake #6: Undervaluing Managed Solutions
Sometimes, paying extra for the managed option is the best route. RDS is an excellent example of this. It costs about double the base compute price, but you get a tremendous return on investment. Databases are complex, and managing them is distracting and challenging. Caches, queues, and search indexes are other services that are only worth managing once you reach a certain level of scale.
Conclusion
Absolute Ops believes in Cloud Smart, and sometimes the public cloud is not the right answer. There are great reasons to host your own hardware or have a colocation datacenter do it for you. Maybe I’ll write something about these options in the future.
