From the course: Cloud Complexity Management for Multicloud Deployments

Introduction to cloud complexity management

From the course: Cloud Complexity Management for Multicloud Deployments

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Introduction to cloud complexity management

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- Let's talk about what is cloud complexity management? Well ultimately, this is a response to the fact that people are building layers and layers of cloud computing architecture on top of architectures, using different enabling technologies. Ultimately, the increased complexity is causing issues, such as the ability not to get the value from cloud computing that we anticipated. And the finally, there's a movement out there to complex cloud architecture, such as hybrid and multicloud. And ultimately, this causing complexity unto itself. So, keep in mind that complexity is a natural progression of IT as we move forward. We've been going through this for forty years. Platforms, databases, programming languages, security, management/operations, architecture themselves have evolved over the years in different more complex directions. And that's because we like to use whatever is the current technology that makes sense at the time, and we layer upon layer technology on top of technology. With cloud, we are doing it faster. So the assumption here is that ultimately, enterprises are going to build cloud-based systems and migrate cloud-based systems using small, short sprints. They're typically going to be decoupled, and they're typically going to leverage their own version of the enabling technology. What they think is correct. So, things are getting bad. Ultimately people are migrating to public clouds such as, Amazon Web Services and Google. They're building net new applications. They're building applications using different cloud brands. They're migrating applications. They're migrating data to the cloud. They're migrating machine learning based systems based on the enabling technology that adds value to their applications. They're building data warehouses. They're building net new cool systems, such as, IoT systems, and edge based systems. And then, we're moving projects forward in this kind of direction. So, projects are built on top of projects. They're typically using decoupled sprints, very short work streams, and they're using their own version of enabling technology. So what are the downsides of cloud complexity? Well, many enterprises are reaching a tipping point, and that's where the number of cloud based systems are growing, and the number of on premise based systems are growing, and as they both grow, the complexity is moving up into the right. Ultimately, we're going to hit a point where it is very difficult to operate the systems and manage those systems, and get the cost savings out of them, and the agility savings out of them we thought we would once get. So, that's leading many enterprises to experience negative value. In other words, they're not able to get the return of investment from cloud computing that they thought they would get. And that's because things have gotten so complex, that operations costs more. Maintenance of the data costs more, or maintenance of the processes cost more. Maintenance of the applications cost more. And ultimately, this is about building systems that are much more complex that we originally thought. So what are we going to do? Well, we have some principles that we're putting forward that something that needs to occur. Things you need to get right in order to solve the cloud complexity problem. So we deal with data. We deal with services. We deal with processes. We deal with cognitive computing, or artificially intelligent computing, security, governance, automation, cloud and on premise. And what we're doing by listing these series of domains, is breaking apart a very large, very systemic problem into bit size components that we're able to break down to functional primitive actitivies, and solve the issues in their own domain. And of course we have details that are going to go along with this, such as, the steps of dealing with abstraction meta processes, common learning frameworks, other things that are very important in terms of breaking apart these domains, and something that's much more obtainable. So ultimately, cloud complexity management is about going through this approach of breaking apart you're holistic enterprise cloud computing architecture into domains that can, then again, be abstracted into other processes, other tool bases, other solutions that are able to remove the complexity from your cloud based systems.

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