And it’s harder still if you haven’t given priority to these capabilities for years. It’s even harder to combine those people into high performing teams, and to build professional software and data practices across your organisation. We all know that it’s hard to find and develop great people. But most companies are finding that it is hard to rebuild this differentiating capability. However, this trend is now reversing, as companies realise that the way they build software and use data has a disproportionate impact on their business success. Such choices are often expressed by asking, ‘What are you going to do, and what are you going to ask other people to do?’ I think that we can go further than this, and ask ‘What are you going to be great at, and what great partnerships will you build?’įor many years, many large enterprises have chosen not to be great at software engineering and data science: they have chosen to buy these services from partners. On cloud, the line separates value and hygiene.īelow the line, secure, scalable, reliable infrastructure services.Ībove the line, differentiating value from software and data.īy dividing value and hygiene, the line helps inform our sourcing choices. But without software and data, infrastructure is nothing but cost. Without reliable, secure, scalable infrastructure available when needed, software and data are worse than useless. Value and hygiene are dependent on each other. However hard we work on our infrastructure, we should never forget that it is there to drive this value. You notice it when it doesn’t work, but when it does work, it is invisible.īy contrast, work that uses data in interesting ways or which puts software in the hands of users and customers is a direct driver of value. Yet, if we are honest, it is difficult to classify it as anything other than hygiene: critical, essential work that has the capacity to break everything when it goes wrong, but which enables rather than creates business value. This work, often unnoticed, rarely recognised, powers the hidden engines of the world and enables our technology driven economies to operate. It seems a great dis-service to classify the work that infrastructure teams do in large enterprises as ‘hygiene’, especially when I’ve spent large parts of my career doing such work myself. This capability is now available to cloud tenants.īelow the line, homogenous, software defined infrastructure.Ībove the line, heterogenous business capabilities adapted to evolving needs. One of the distinguishing features of the digital giants which have created the cloud industry is homogenous, abstracted infrastructure, enabling them to scale with speed and confidence. A highly diverse and adaptable set of applications which process data in interesting ways can be a sign of a flexible, product-oriented and innovative business which allows teams high levels of autonomy.īut heterogeneity at the infrastructure layer rarely achieves anything but complexity, cost and risk. Heterogeneity at some layers of the architecture is not necessarily bad. It’s very common, when discussing the architecture of a large enterprise to hear the rueful lament, ‘Of course, we’ve got one of everything.’ Let’s explore three types of separation implied by the line: heterogeneity from homogeneity value from hygiene and capability from services.ĭespite strong governance controls and complex approval processes, despite layers of architecture review boards and purchasing panels, most enterprises are plagued by heterogeneity at all layers of their architecture. I think that the line has profound implications for the way we organise and run technology within enterprises, but that many enterprises do not realise these implications until they are some years into their cloud journey. Do we really need another reminder of that? We all know that adopting a public cloud platform involves a separation of concerns: that there is work that you do and work that your cloud provider does. The line is made of APIs.Ī diagram this simple also needs a few words of justification. Your cloud provider lives below the line. No, the graphics in this article have not glitched: that really is a single, horizontal line.Ī diagram this sparse needs a few words of explanation. I call it ‘the line’: Figure 1: comprehensive cloud architecture diagram I’d like to add to that stock of diagrams by introducing one more, which I hope will be helpful. There are a lot of diagrams which attempt to explain cloud, ranging from the classic ‘staircase’ depiction of the shared responsibility model to many, many elaborate diagrams covered in the logos of cloud services.
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