Accelerating Cloud Adoption

Chapter 7. Cloud Operations and Reliability

This chapter will focus on operations in the cloud. I’ve mentioned more than once—because it’s important—that a cloud platform team should think and act like a cloud service provider: focused on the product and with an unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction. It also means making security and compliance core competencies of the platform. This new mindset requires a different approach: one that views operations through the eyes of a cloud service provider.

As of September 2020, AWS had almost two hundred services to choose from. Customers can use as many or as few of them as they wish. Some customers only use basic IaaS services like compute, network, and storage; others go all the way up the stack and use fully managed services for technologies like blockchain, IoT, analytics, and gaming. AWS does not know or care how customers build on top of its platform. Its goal is to make sure the platform it provides meets its service levels, so customers can build on it and meet their service levels.

One main goal of the platform team is to drive adoption measured in usage of the platform, both at the overall platform level and the service level. Cloud providers accomplish this through many means, including evangelism, training, embedding architects to help with solutioning, and others. But probably the most important thing they do to drive adoption is providing easy-to-use and reliable services that customers can count on. This, in essence, ...