Migrating to AWS: A Manager's Guide

Foreword

I’m a golfer (thanks in advance for the sympathy)—I started playing as a teenager. As a kid, I played baseball and tennis. When it was time to play golf, I just picked up a club. How hard could it be? I already understood foot position, grip, weight shift, and follow-through. To suggest I wasn’t very good for the first 15 years I played golf would grossly understate just how bad I was at the sport. What I came to realize was that, while there were numerous similarities, the subtleties of the swing in each sport were very different and appreciating the differences was important. We’ll get back to this.

For the first 15 years of my professional career, I worked in IT. I managed large IT programs in the mid-late 1990s, during the boom of the large enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformations. There were several drivers for these transformations as the year 2000 approached. For some companies, significant growth over the past several years—including expansion from the “dot-com” explosion—led to the need for transformation and reengineering. Global companies needed to transform as well, but the scale and architectural constraints imposed by their geographic requirements often led to ERP instances in multiple geographic regions. Lastly, for companies with large legacy mainframe systems, the large ERP was a means of fixing the most famous Y2K problem: six-digit date mathematics.

By the time 2001 rolled around, many CIOs were challenged to quantify the value their recent ...