A Practical Guide to Cloud Migration

Chapter 9. Thinking of Cloud Platforms as a Software Problem

Rahul Gupta and Bharath Baiju, Strategic Cloud Engineers

Who

• Engineers

• Technical Leads

Why

The traditional on-prem infrastructure world is often diversified if viewed from a software standpoint. Almost all the different pieces that constitute the “platform” came from different vendors, making them hard to manage in a consistent way or even orchestrate them as part of a single workflow.

This results in multiple handoffs between different teams, with each team using its respective ticketing system, leading to the deployment and infrastructure provisioning tasks spanning multiple days, sometimes even weeks. This whole cycle repeats itself for every simple piece of software that requires changes to these components.

Cloud platforms being completely API-driven offers a shift from this by enabling users to undertake all operations through automation and to apply software development best practices. This allows you to think of infrastructure, configuration, CI/CD, and delivery as a software problem—a problem that is solved by engineering, a common baseline of tooling, APIs, and best-practices-as-code collectively referred to as “the platform.” This platform is built and evolved collectively with application teams to shift left, ship faster, and reduce toil.

There are three main added benefits of this. First, modernizing the traditional IT functions into a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) team helps drive cloud ...