8 bit bus

 IT Trend for 2021: A Tale of Two Clouds

Quick!  You want to get out of running server farms.  You want to get out of DR.  And there's an MBA breathing down your back to cut costs.  What do you do?

Easy!  Go to the Cloud!  Solve all your problems.

Fast Forward Two Years.  Now you connect employees, customers, third party vendors, business partners, and myriads of IOT devices together... with not one cloud, but three, four, or five different clouds.  Oh, and maybe a couple of hybrid solutions, too.  And it's frankly a big headache, perhaps worse than when you had on-prem virtual server fams in several systems talking with each other through SOAP.

And you may ask yourself: well, how did I get here?

Maybe you simply migrated existing applications, instead of writing cloud native versions. You know, to save time and money.

Maybe the companies you interface with already do things their way, with their own cloud solutions. 

Maybe you postponed governance for later. You know, to save time, and maybe money.

Maybe you postponed security considerations. 

Maybe this big multi-cloud solution is highly coupled, with low cohesion!  (Didn't we learn this lesson 30 years ago?)

When you have all those moving parts, reliability suffers.  The whole system is only as reliable as its least-reliable piece.  The human brain can't understand the whole system when the whole system is a gigantic monstrosity.  (Didn't we learn this lesson long ago?)

But actually, I think there will be TWO emerging trends here:

(1) BRAIN FIRST.  The First Cloud is Governed.  It is built up of microservices; experience-driven UIs; legacy systems; and simple, native applications.  I say simple, because they will largely be written by low-code or no-code generation systems.  In some cases, they may even be automated to some degree.  It will encompass multiple clouds, but because the effort has "governance", migration and adoption are both well-thought out.  

(2) GIT 'ER DONE.  The Second Cloud is built up of a combination of migrated applications and custom native applications, as before.  But to save up-front time and cost, governance is ineffectual.  As a result, there will be chaos and tech debt.  Since we live in a time of fast turnaround, that means the Quick Solution also turns ugly faster than it used to.  For cloud-engineer contractors who love creating order from chaos, this will be a good time.

Other Results of Effective Governance

In brief.

• cost control
• data protection and privacy
• future proofing