A Practical Guide to Cloud Migration

Chapter 2. Celebrating (and Tweaking) Your Culture

Adrienne Walcer, Technical Program Manager, Google SRE

Who

• CxOs

• Technical Leads

• Managers

• Enabling Team Leads

• Engineers

• Business Functions

Why

It’s possible to achieve a cloud transformation while keeping your momentum and keeping your team on board. To do so, you need to pay careful attention to your company culture.

Let me tell you about Company A. Company A was a start-up that used a proprietary application to generate reports for a niche market based on public datasets. The company had begun as a relatively small outfit, serving in-region partners and growing year by year, but eventually it landed a pretty sizable contract. The ongoing maintenance required a shift away from the infrastructure on which the company had previously been reliant. Oh yes, it was moving into the cloud.

Company A’s leadership contracted with an IaaS/PaaS cloud provider and set an aggressive internal mandate: within six months, they’d conclude their migration. The company’s application architecture was not optimized to be cloud-deployed, and the development team pushed back. The team was already utterly busy even without making major changes, and it needed time to learn the infrastructure it was shifting to and appropriately redesign the heart of the company’s operation. But leadership was firm—the big contract they’d landed had received major attention, and they were anticipating a few more large RFPs headed their way soon. The ...