Accelerating Cloud Adoption

Chapter 3. People

Technology is easy. People are hard. Adopting cloud computing requires significant change within an organization. Each process or technology change will affect real people and their lives. This chapter focuses on the skills your organization and its people will need for a successful cloud transition.

T-Shaped Teams

The previous chapter discussed technology changes like containers, microservices, and immutable infrastructure—all of which require new ways of working and new skills. That is a lot of change to throw at workers. You’ll need people with a strong command of some of these concepts, and at least a basic understanding of all of them:

• Distributed computing

• How and when to use stateful versus stateless services

• Microservice architectures

• Container runtime and orchestration

• Serverless computing

• Building CI/CD pipelines

• Cloud security

• Hybrid and multicloud architectures

Companies are looking to hire full stack engineers, which refers to someone who is fluent in all of the skills I just listed. In my opinion, you have as much chance of spotting a unicorn as a full stack engineer. What we really should be aiming for is full stack teams, which are small teams made up of people whose collective expertise covers the full stack (see Figure 3-1).

Figure 3-1. Full stack teams should be T-shaped

Traditional operating models tend to encourage workers whose knowledge ...