Whoa! Everyone calls cloud a destination, what is Preston going on about here?
I grew up in a farming town, though I didn’t come from a farming family, myself. My father mistakenly thought he could get into hobby farming, and while there were times he undoubtedly found it satisfying, I doubt he ever found it profitable.
The time I spent growing up in the country taught me a few lessons, including:
- There is little more beautiful than walking outside on a cold, cloudless night, kilometres away from any ground light, and being able to look up and see the great band of the Milky Way and Southern Cross .
- When you go for a walk on a country road at midnight in the dark, that crocodile you think you see on the side of the road is just a log. (On the other hand, that stick on the road may very well be a snake.)
- The Australian Nationals party, supposedly the “party of the country” stopped caring for people in the country in the 1970s and since then have been entirely focused on big business operating in the country. One day, farmers might realise this and vote accordingly. (If there are any left.)
- If you change your product, you don’t destructively pivot.
It’s the last point I want to talk about for a short while.
I grew up in grain country, with a sideline of sheep and cattle. (Reading Dark Emu at the moment makes me question just how effective this was, of course. If you’ve not read it, I heartily recommend it.)
But, let’s say you’re a farmer with apple orchards. Your business has been quite successful, but the market is pivoting away from apples. It’s clear that the successful businesses in your area have pivoted from apple production to wine production. Wine, after all, is big business. You want to pivot your business to wine-making. So, what do you do?
Well, for a start you’re going to need some grapevines. So, do you:
- Rip all the apple trees out and plant grapevines?
- Use that spare field near to your house to plant grapevines?
The first option will likely give you more room to plant grapevines – the second method implies a more measured, slower pivot to your new product.
Grapevines take 3-5 years to mature before you can start harvesting them, and some winemakers suggest you need even longer before you can start getting good, reliable winemaking grapes, depending on the varietal you want to produce.
Maybe you don’t have 3-5 years of operating funds in the bank, so you make the smart move by using the spare field near your house to start planting grapevines. This lets you build up a new product base while keeping your existing streams of income.
Fast forward six months – the grapevines are now planted, and you’re tending to them. What do you do about your apple trees? You’ve kept them as a fallback in case the grapevine idea doesn’t work, and because they represent your current income – or at least the majority of your income.
Now you need to start spending money on the apple trees. You need to get some trimming done, the equipment you use to harvest the apples is getting old and tired and unable to keep up with production. So the question is, you’re all-in on where you want to be, but you’ve still got to deal with where you are now.
Having kept the apple trees, do you let all the apples rot on the trees? Do you switch from advanced picking techniques and revert back to manual picking because you don’t want to spend the money on equipment maintenance?
So here’s my cloud is a product story. Someone in the business – someone very senior in the business says, “we’re all in on Cloud!” Maybe that becomes a story on an IT website. Maybe your CIO even stands up on stage at an AWS, Azure or GCP event and talks about how excited the business is about pivoting to Cloud.
That’s cool! You’re intending to have transformed your business in 5 years such that 90% of your workloads are running as public cloud. So naturally, you want to focus your efforts on that public cloud work.
But! 90% or more of your workloads currently still run in your datacenter. It’s not going to be an instant pivot. You could try to do that, but that’ll mean doing lift-and-shift, and you’ll end up being one of those CIOs the industry talks about sotto-voce, “Did you hear about that CIO who pushed everything into the public cloud and used the entire year’s budget in 3 months? After standing up on ________’s Cloud Forum Event and being their poster child for transformation?”
Sure, Cloud is a destination, but you also need to think of it as a product. When you’re working in a datacentre, there’s a little wriggle-room for thinking of your systems as systems rather than workloads. When you move to the public cloud, everything becomes a workload. That means everything becomes a product.
How do I sell this workload, and how much money do I make back from it?
But there’s a correlation to that change of thinking: the same thought process has to apply to all of your on-premises systems, too. They cease being systems and transform into being workloads.
So let me ask you those questions again: you’re going to stop being an apple producer and start being a winemaker. Do you plough your apple trees into the ground and wait 3-5 years for income? Do you keep the apple trees but constantly reduce the efficiency with which you harvest your apples to the point that they’re withering on the trees?
The usual “pivot to cloud” inflection point is 3-5 years. Mysteriously in many businesses, this keeps on being a moving target: 5 years from 2016. Then 5 years from 2017, 2018, and suddenly it’s “5 years from 2020 we’ll be all in the cloud”.
It’s not just that moving to the cloud is, in itself, a moving target, but let’s be brutally honest: 5 years is a bloody long time in business. Hell, 6 months can be a long time.
When you’re making that cloud pivot, it’s not about keeping the lights on in the datacentre, as so many people describe, it’s about keeping the money coming in. The datacentre isn’t just random chunks of equipment, it’s your income.
You’re all in on cloud – I get that. In 5 years, you want 90% of your business to be running in the public cloud. I get that. But I also get that you’re currently 90% on-premises and 10% in public cloud. Don’t focus your attention so much on the current 10% and the vision of its growth to the point that you forget what currently brings the money in. Until the day that you turn the lights off and hand over the keys to someone else, your datacentres need commensurate investment in the value of their workloads.
Otherwise, well, we could end up with another sotto-voce example in the market.