Ah, summer. Time to take a well-deserved break and go somewhere. And since flying to many of the places we’d like to visit would be a hassle, that means a summer road trip.
“Are we there yet?” goes the kids’ refrain from the back seat of every family road trip, as it did when I was in the back seat chorus.
Hopefully my readers aren’t too road weary. What happens when we get back home, and get back to work? We’ll find ourselves on another kind of digital road trip with our business, to destinations that always seem to grow more distant from where we are today.
Instead of kids, it’ll be management, employees — and most importantly, customers — at these crossroads that will be asking “Are we there yet?”
Plotting the journey to Cloud
If you have any professional stake in the digital experience of your customers, partners or employees, you are already ticketed as a passenger on an eternal journey to cloud, whether planned or not.
One certainty drives everyone to go. Staying behind means failing to scale elastically and keep up with the competition. We want to make this journey to cloud safely. But total assurance is in shorter supply than ever, because we’re not talking about one cloud vendor, or even one paradigm of cloud deployment anymore.
Sure, some started on AWS and never looked back. But unanticipated service costs and compliance concerns lead companies to consider taking the hybrid cloud route, combining multiple possible CSPs with on-premises resources that could share a control plane.
Exactly how you scale compute and storage resources becomes as important as how fast you can deliver. The journey to cloud computing continuously evolves, rolling into new areas of abstraction and innovation.
Should we use containers or serverless functions? How do we become cloud-native? By using Kubernetes? Service mesh? On the edge? How should we store data in a stateless world? Are we there yet?
Going beyond agility
The value of delivering innovation just one step ahead of competitors has been another never ending journey — after all, maybe we will get there faster if we build and fail faster.
Developers started breaking down the barriers to fast feature delivery with Agile methodologies, then about 12 years ago, the DevOps movement shook up organizations even more. Soon, vendors started releasing ‘DevOps tools’ which ostensibly supplanted waterfall methodology by automating changes, observing system information and placing safety gateways into the software delivery pipeline.
If there might be thousands of developers working on an existing code base, each just wants to make sure their stuff still works in production. All too often, if there’s a DevOps team or tool in large orgs, it acts to reduce risk, reducing agility with it by creating more hurdles in the process.
How do we start ‘doing’ DevOps, and how will we know we are doing it? Should we go hire an SRE now, or just make everyone read that observability book? Are we there yet?
Automation for the people
If passengers are too impatient for DevOps, then perhaps they might wait for the other shoe to drop on the concept of citizen development.
By taking this route, ordinary co-workers and managers strive to deliver functional automation to achieve supernatural productivity heights — without needing to stop for R&D budgets and expensive technical teams.
Many process tools have taken on this mantle, from attempting to modernize business processes and data into dynamically assembled DPA applications, to armies of bots and intelligent automation methods.
Some customers realize the worst of both worlds here — if they deploy poorly abstracted or designed instances of automation into target deployment environments that either don’t scale, or turn out to be too difficult to maintain given the complexity of real-world business.
How do we read the signposts if there are so many buzzwords to account for on the road to automation, from BPM to RPA and even AI and machine learning involved? Are we there yet?
Cybersecurity
Talk about a moving target. It seems like every business is bound for more breaches than ever. And much costlier ones too, growing from $3.84M in 2020 to $4.24M in business cost per incident in 2021 according to one IBM report.
Companies are finding it very hard to hire enough good security professionals, so they keep buying more and more security tools. A mid-sized company typically has more than 30 different vendor tools, with larger companies averaging more than 72 unique tools in their security toolkit. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be slowing threats down.
Insidious exploits like ransomware and supply chain attacks are on the rise, with easily utilized dark web tools, a cryptocurrency system to pay cybercriminal rewards, and an endless army of attackers constantly varying up their exploits. Even state actors are getting involved.
With so many flavors of security dashboards, control planes, threat detection, prevention and response tools constantly coming online, will any of these tools make employees and leaders justifiably confident of their security posture? Are we there yet?
The Intellyx Take
All four of these routes to modernization have one thing in common.
We might never actually experience ‘getting there’ in any of these lanes, as competition and customer needs will keep moving the technology finish line, and new tools will always be introduced. But there’s great value in setting out on these continuous journeys.
Bigger vendors will rise and fall, but there will always be new startups seeking to push the boundaries of these four paths to digital transformation, and major companies investing in technologies, research partners and centers of innovation. We will cross unbelievable thresholds by today’s standards.
You almost never really feel one of these major milestones occurring until it is passing you by. Take for instance, the rise of Kubernetes as a cloud-native reference architecture and its accompanying innovative ecosystem seems like a real game changer.
But then again, once most people are using K8s, it could basically fade into the background in importance like the containers and VMs abstracted before it, just like cloud computing can still be glossed over as ‘a computer somewhere else.’ There will always be a new edge of abstraction. That’s OK.
Who knows where we’ll be by next summer’s road trip?
One last takeaway. If you offload responsibility for the success of your next release or customer feature solely onto a particular technology, don’t be surprised by a lack of patience from the kids in the back seat when you don’t arrive.
Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
© 2021, Intellyx, LLC. Intellyx retains editorial control over the content of this article. Get our Cloud-Native Computing poster. If you are a vendor seeking coverage from Intellyx, please contact us at PR@intellyx.com. Image source: Nicole Mays and Matthew Sullivan, flickr creative commons.
