This is a fusion talk I presented at the devopsdays conference heled in Galway in 2018. In it I share some of the misuses of the cloud I have seen and then focus on the five essential characteristics of cloud with the aim of imparting the importance of adopting these characteristics to improve performance.

1. THE MIS(USE) OF CLOUD
INFRASTRUCTURE
DEREK KELLY
SENIOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENGINEER

2. THE NIST DEFINITION OF CLOUD
COMPUTING - SUMMARISED
• Cloud computing enables on-demand access to a pool of
computing resources (servers, storage, networks, services etc)
that can be rapidly provisioned and made available with
minimal overhead.

3. THE NIST DEFINITION OF CLOUD
COMPUTING - SUMMARISED
• Cloud computing enables on-demand access to a pool of
computing resources (servers, storage, networks, services etc)
that can be rapidly provisioned and made available with
minimal overhead

4. CLOUD IS NOT ANOTHER DATA CENTER
• Factor in hardware lifetime, Maintenance & Support
• Long provision time(weeks - months)
• Cost is upfront, based on capacity
VS
• Self-service, on-demand
• Fast provision time(seconds - minutes)
• Cost is based on consumption

5. WHY AM I HERE

6. MOMENT OF CLARITY
DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA)

7. DORA KEY FINDING
How you implement cloud infrastructure matters
The cloud improves software delivery performance and teams
that leverage all of cloud computing’s essential characteristics
are 23 times more likely to be elite performers

8. ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS
• 5 Characteristics defined by NIST
• Not ground-breaking
• Readily available from cloud providers

9. 1 - ON DEMAND SELF-SERVICE
• A consumer can provision resources as needed automatically
without requiring human interaction

10. 2 – BROAD NETWORK ACCESS
• Widely available and can be accessed through consumer
devices

11. 3 – RESOURCE POOLING
• Provider resources are pooled in a multi-tenancy model

12. 4 – RAPID ELASTICITY
• Scaling with demand
• Gives the illusion of unlimited resources

13. 5 – MEASURED SERVICE
• Allows resource usage to be monitored, controlled, and
reported for transparency and cost analysis

14. HOW MANY UTILIZE THESE
CHARACTERISTICS?
• According to DORA only 22% of respondents said they did
• Almost 4 in 5 respondents not utilizing cloud fully

15. WHY NOT?
• Infrastructure vs Software Delivery

16. WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN?
• Stop being part of the problem
• Become part of the solution

17. WHAT NEXT?
• Accept Fate – “It is what it is”
• Leverage this information to drive conversations and influence
change

18. KEY TAKEAWAYS
• High team performance is attainable
• Top performing teams adopt the best that cloud has to offer
• The characteristics to achieve high performance are clearly
defined

19. REFERENCES
• DORA - https://devops-research.com/
• Accelerate: State of DevOps Report 2018 -
https://cloudplatformonline.com/2018-state-of-
devops.html
• NIST Cloud Definition -
https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-
145/final

20. THANK YOU