How to be successful in the cloud?

Teams switching from traditional environments to a cloud model face many challenges. Working with cloud demands new skills from the team and a radical different approach to the development of software.

What are the factors that contribute to success?

To be able to survive in the cloud, a team needs to understand measuring. One does not simply drive to Italy with the dashboard blacked out and the windshield painted black. A team needs to implement measuring to see where they are going. This means application, infra and team metrics.

In order to take advantage of what the cloud has to offer, a team needs to invest in automation. Fully automated build pipeline, scaling infra, infra as code. These are fundamental for working in a cloud environment. They are also very practical when you work in a traditional environment, so you can start whenever you want.

A team needs to be multifunctional, this means that the team should be able to develop and maintain their product. Not all team members need to be able to do everything, but in total the team should not need external support. 

When a team needs to make decisions they should be able to do so themselves. They should not need to get authorizations from anybody else. After all a team knows best what they and their application is doing. A team should be in control of all their environments, pipelines, application and development.

Learning is the most important factor when it comes to working in the cloud. Continuous improvement can only be achieved by letting things fail, inspect and measuring. Teams need to learn how to fail fast, inspect early and improve skills and architecture.

How to be successful?

Measuring is done by defining KPIs with the team. Define reachable goals on performance, predictability, learning. Think about what you and your team want to improve and start measuring that. Make a simple and broad dashboard on which you show our KPIs and rework them on a regular basis. For the application and infra tools like ELK, Graphana en Prometheus can help a lot in getting insights in the application performance.

Rigorous automation is mandatory. By automating manual processes, a lot of time and quality is gained. Reserve enough time to improve automation. It is important that all team members contribute, all disciplines can reduce work and improve quality by automation. Build pipelines, automate triggers, incorporate quality.

Have you ever seen toddlers playing in a sandbox? Notice that they sit next to each other and play their own game. Only after they grow they learn to play together and share toys. This is the same behavior we see in teams, everybody working hard in their own discipline. It is only after we pair and learn to share knowledge and develop each others skills that we become more mature in our work and can become multifunctional. One of the nicest workshops you can do is to make T-shape profiles with the team. People will find shared interest that they can use to team up. 

To get authorization to the team, we need more than just the team. Management and change advisory boards must be willingly to give away their powers. But with great power comes great responsibility as well. So the team should be very transparent in order to gain the powers. This starts with getting grip on the flow in your work. Create a value stream map for all the products you create. Map the delays, risks and dependencies. Get management involved in the flow of things and your challenges. This will build trust and will grant you more powers.

You can only really be successful if you know how to fail. Make failure small and simple, define quality standards, inspect all failures thoroughly in order to learn. Involve the people around the team in the inspection and learning process. One start is to learn how to read error log files with the team, inspect stack traces and logfiles. You can also use tools to try to break your application like chaos monkey or attack proxies.

Have success

When you implement the points above you have a good jump start at being successful in the cloud. By regular inspection and being transparent, you, your team and the people you depend on can help grow a successful cloud implementation. And the beauty is, that it also works if you working in a more traditional environment.