Cloud Computing: More Than Just Infrastructure

Cloud computing infrastructure, including private cloud infrastructure, set a whole new standard for infrastructure expectations. Until recently, computing infrastructure took weeks, months, or years. Much of this depended upon project priority, budgeting, and the availability of staff.

Today, cloud computing infrastructure is measured within minutes. Thanks to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, you can go from initial cloud setup to running virtual servers in under 10 minutes.

Both developers and applications groups are thrilled about cloud computing infrastructure innovations offering faster application development and deployment. Quality also improves because infrastructure rationing is no longer necessary. The new speed and accuracy allow development teams to create fast infrastructures to try new initiatives and take them down quickly if they don’t work.

Fast infrastructure capabilities are great, but cloud computing offers even more. Infrastructure is just the foundation of cloud computing with more value just waiting to be discovered. Other cloud computing services can speed up software development which pushes the lifecycle process into overdrive.

Evolution in Cloud Computing Thought

Drew Firment of Capital One shares the evolution in thought surrounding cloud computing in his blog. Cloud computing is leading to an IT revolution. It requires companies to rethink how they deliver value to their customers and reminds them that their customers don’t care about their private cloud infrastructure. They’re more concerned about the customer experience.

Firment points out many IT organizations and employees fail to understand a customer’s indifference to the company’s computing includes everything except the value experienced by the customer.

He also notes about the DevOps toolchain many IT organizations are creating to make their application pipeline as fast as the infrastructure:

·         Unique combinations of CI/CD tools used throughout an organization are counterproductive and unnecessary. While most enterprise DevOps continuous delivery pipelines work locally, they are detrimental to the well-being of the whole system.

·         Similar stories play out between the DevOps pipeline and the commoditization of infrastructure into a compute grid by AWS. Thanks to CodeBuild, a newer addition to AWS Developer Tools, you have fewer reasons to roll your own pipeline.

This means IT organizations should examine how they go from the concept idea of an application to the delivery of functionality to a user in the fastest and cheapest way possible. Any factor that doesn’t differentiate the parent company in the marketplace is ripe for replacement by a low-cost provider, typically a scale cloud provider.

This allows IT organizations to focus their budget and efforts on features that offer their customers unique functionality. Though adopting this idea means IT organizations must understand cloud computing as something that’s more than just fast and cheap infrastructure. It’s a full set of computing services for building applications quickly. Even more, every service an application group leverages becomes part of an application the group isn’t responsible for. This off-loading of responsibility allows groups to place their focus and efforts on customer value.

While IT organizations spend so much time obtaining and managing private cloud infrastructure, it’s challenging to recognize how cloud computing changes assumptions with delivering applications. Firment reminds IT organizations to change their assumptions from managing computing resources to recognize they’re delivering customer value.

In addition, IT organizations need to understand this requires evaluating their entire value chain and focusing solely on what they can deliver. This means passing the responsibility of the computing stack by as much as possible and utilizing staff resources for company-specific functionality.