97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know

Chapter 27. Optimizing Processes for the Cloud: Patterns and Antipatterns

Mike Kavis

Managing Director of Technology/Cloud Practice, Deloitte Consulting

I’ve been consulting on cloud adoption since 2013.¹ Back then, convincing CEOs and boards that cloud computing was the way forward was a hard sell for IT leaders. But as public cloud adoption increased, companies moved to the cloud or built new workloads in the cloud much faster than they had traditionally deployed software. Two common antipatterns emerged.

Antipattern 1: The Wild West

Developers, business units, and product teams now had access to on-demand infrastructure, and they leveraged it to get their products out the door faster than ever. They had no guidelines or best practices, and development teams took on responsibilities they’d never had before. Rather than developing a systematic approach and implementing it across the organization, though, many companies simply left cloud decisions to individual parts of the organization: a lawless, Wild West approach.

Part of the problem was that each business unit or product team was “reinventing the wheel”: each would research, buy, and implement its favorite third-party tools for logging, monitoring, and security. Each took a different approach to designing and securing the environment. More than a few also implemented their own continuous integration and continuous delivery ...