My notes and questions from "Cloud Question Time" panel event at Leeds Business Week. The event was well attended with lots of debate and opinion and experiences surrounding cloud computing, cloud migration, data centres and vendors. 11th October 2017

1. Cloud Question Time
#LeedsBizWeek
11th October 2017
A Question Time-style panel event
designed to spark controversial debate
surrounding cloud computing,
migration, data centres and vendors.
Andrew Norman – Principal Architect – BJSS
Adrian Roberts – Director, Cloud Solutions Architecture – Vmware
Mark Scaife – Head of Cloud Practice – Daisy Group
Alex Wilmot – Cloud Solution Director – Daisy Group

2. 1) Legacy migration to the cloud is easy!

3. Legacy migration to the cloud is easy!
• All migrations require careful planning
• It can be hard to switch the financial mind set of a company from a CapEx
with depreciation model to an OpEx perpetual cost with no deprecation.
https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/a-framework-for-cloud-it-and-business-transformation/3
• With “cloud teams” moving to “Infrastructure as script/code” a lot of
people in the industry are saying “what about my job?”
• Savings from cloud are hard to realise from just migrating or using VMs
(Virtual Machines). The true cost savings come from on-demand pricing.
• Cloud migrations should look to use SAAS offerings to make improvements
over what could be achieved in-house, such as petabyte scale data
processing.

4. Legacy migration to the cloud is easy!
• Architect’s job role have moved on from just being “hands-on” or drawing
boxes and lines. They must understand finance, security, source code,
release processes to name a few of their areas of focus.
• Cloud breaks down the original skills silos as most implementations cut
across the disciplines of storage, networking, security and compute – this
can all now be achieved in one script.
• Almost all established industries are in “hybrid era” as everything moves
to the cloud – there was much debate about how long this era will last,
from 5 years to 20 years!
• Cloud teams can become silos with everyone else seen as “old school” and
not relevant. This can be a challenge to an organisation trying to make the
best use of it’s resources and bringing everyone along on the journey.

5. Legacy migration to the cloud is easy!
• Cloud is the biggest creator of “Shadow IT”
• There was a consensus, that you would take your “top 3” most used apps and
migrate them to get the most value in a cloud migration.
• A phased approach of
– Phase 1 to move On-Premises to IAAS (virtual machines)
– Phase 2 to use containerisation to get a more on-demand cost model
– Phase 3 redesign applications to use the best of cloud (database as a service,
server less, per use cost models, etc.)
• Architects and developers need to “design to the requirements and not the
features available on the cloud provider”. This will help to stop chasing the latest
cool tech/service.

6. Legacy migration to the cloud is easy!
Q. What is the Target Operating Model (in IT) for your company in near
future? How does this effect your architectural decisions?
Q. What is your company’s target architecture for the use of PAAS & SAAS?
When is it envisaged this will be achieved?
Q. Who in your company owns Cloud governance?
Q. Who in your company makes the decision on which provider to use and if to
stick with one, or use multiple cloud providers?
Q. Who in your company is managing Cloud cost control, and understanding
where that cost is being spent? An example given was an employee who had
left a business with an expensive AWS redshift database running.

7. 2) Are private data centres obsolete?

8. Are private data centres obsolete?
• Common theme was that there are “battles” between the CTO’s vision and the IT
security team as a business moves to the cloud
• It’s hard to keep up with all of the features that cloud providers are rolling out and
improving. More often or not without help from the provider (directly or
indirectly) it’s hard to architect the best solution.
• Vendor cultures of public cloud are different to that of private cloud providers. The
questions asked and the relationships are different and this can be a challenge to
some of the IT department. “No you cannot visit the site”, “No you cannot have
access to the hardware” were voiced as examples.
• It was noted that public cloud providers such as Microsoft & Amazon are changing
tact on how they deal with enterprises and trying to be more approachable.

9. 3) SAAS vs IAAS (vs PAAS)

10. SAAS vs IAAS (vs PAAS)
• The initial use of IAAS was discussed as a first phase and a great way to get PoC built and the
cloud environment secured.
• Architecturally SAAS & PAAS is a loss of control and often a simplification of a service (i.e.:
database as a service). Is this acceptable? does the solution still work and meet the business
and IT requirements?
• Moving to the cloud is a cultural shift that is felt across IT (and the wider business) as it
means not having complete control over all of the environment. It was commented about the
increase in speed of provisioning.
• There was consensus that companies are moving through a roadmap of IAAS  PAAS 
SAAS. Just as AWS outlines @ https://aws.amazon.com/types-of-cloud-computing/

11. SAAS vs IAAS (vs PAAS)
Q. Has your company undertaken an assessment of it’s cloud provider’s SAAS
and PAAS features? Does it understand how solutions could be delivered using
them over an IAAS approach. This could include migrating to containers
(Docker) and off VM’s.
Q. Is your company looking to be cloud agnostic / multi-cloud?
Q. What’s your CTO’s opinion? Does the company IT strategy outline this?
Q. Does your company have a centralised cloud skillset or are cloud skills
distributed across the IT function?
Q. As an architect are you able to create solutions that are in the cloud and if
so can you use SAAS & PAAS features?

12. 4) Is cloud vendor lock-in a
problem worth panicking over?

13. Is cloud vendor lock-in a problem worth panicking over?
• It is the authors opinion that sticking to one cloud provider is a good idea as it means you
can concentrate on securing your environment and learning how to get the best out of its
offerings/features.
• Only worth panicking over if you have no exit strategy.
• Most vendor features eventually get replicated across the other vendors
• With the current dominance of AWS & Azure “it feels like a VHS vs BETAMAX moment” in the
history of IT.
• The use of “Terraform” (or other) configuration and deployment tools helps break the
dependencies.
• The use of containers (Docker and Kubernetes) makes migration or multi-cloud more
achievable.
• The previous concern raised over “Cloud being the biggest driver of shadow IT” led onto
discussions around IT departments / developers / architects choosing a provider based on
“shininess of a feature”. Multi-cloud by stealth.

14. Is cloud vendor lock-in a problem worth panicking over?
Q. Does your company review it’s use of cloud and review if
it’s time to migrate to another cloud provider?
Q. What are the business drivers for adopting a multi-cloud
provider approach?
Q. Does your company have the expertise and IT processes
(SOCs & NOCs, etc.) to monitor all used cloud providers?
Q. Is your company looking to migrate from VM’s to
Containers where possible? Would this drive you to migrate
to other providers?

15. Thanks for reading my notes from the discussion