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Kiran (AK) Adapa's engineering, tech, findings blog

Cloud is part of everyone's business model

As of this writing (Jan 10, 2021), there are a lot of developments happening post-general elections in the USA. I am in no way positioned to speak on the recent developments and how the social media giants like Twitter and Facebook are reacting. But, one thing that I have been looking at is the massive scale and virality that is built into some of the Products that are coming up as alternatives to Twitter and Facebook.

On the technology side, every business/app needs a place to host and run their services. The most recent announcement by the AWS Cloud on taking Parler offline prompted a great Twitter thread by the duckbill groups’s Chief Cloud Economist Corey Quinn.

As always, @QuinnyPig in his twitter fashion illustrates mechanics and some technical details on what it means when AWS Cloud says it will boot Parler off of AWS.

Two points are most important for any business that builds on Cloud:

(1) WHAT is built on Cloud and 
(2) HOW it is built on it?

Quoting @QuinnyPig (emphasis added)…

“Making WHAT you built on AWS’s systems work elsewhere is super challenging.”

This making it “elsewhere” whether another cloud or on-premise servers requires how the original technical architecture and solution(s) are built.

It is not a binary choice and requires cross-teams organization, design, planning and execution. Rebuilding or migrating/transition to elsewhere requires highly technical skillsets. As @QuinnyPig mentioned the Web and the mobile Apps use different sets of applications stack, programming languages, tools and services.

As much as one wants to think and hope that solutions are built in a modular way that may not always be the case. As Products and solutions are built, teams take up or accrue a lot of Technical Debt as they focus on delivering on Products. This focus is rightfully needed if you are moving fast as the teams balance on delivering value vs building an ideal/right solution. Majority of the time the technical teams are trying to do catch up in thinking about strategic direction.

This is the WHAT part of what is being built in the Cloud.

Another great item from @QuinnyPig

“These services aren’t really directly compatible with other companies’ offerings. Making what you built on AWS’s systems work elsewhere is super challenging.”

This is a super important point.

AWS, like any other businesses, has been building a moat around its business to discourage companies that hosts services on its cloud services to not even think about going anywhere.

Even if you want to think about going that “somewhere” (such as Microsoft @Azure or Google @googlecloud ) as @QuinnyPig mentioned it is “super challenging” to do so. In other words, this activity consumes a lot of super technical effort, time, and money and not say the risks and rewards that involved in taking up such an initiative.

And, most importantly making them all work (after a full or partial transition), for your Product or Service, the same way requires a lot of non-technical activity as well. Things are bound to fail and causing downtimes and negative user experiences.

Quoting part of @QuinnyPig

“The way AWS’s services work–how you create them, how long that creation process takes, how you get data onto them? They behave differently in AWS’s world than elsewhere.”

This relates to that HOW part of the solution.

At the heart of all these services is the DATA. How you operate on this data and use the data for your users and products. It is not difficult to get the data out and load into another place. But, how you get that Data out and how you build up new services to use that Data becomes gnarly at best. Not let your services get affected when you do these activities is super challenging for the facts that was mentioned above on how AWS built/building its moat.

At this point, every Cloud Service Provider (CSP) is not just only providing simple hosting services. They are building a lot of PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) offerings to help their customers. Businesses are leveraging theses PaaS offerings to further enhance their products/services or increase speed to market. This Platform, in turn, is becoming each of these CSP’s MOAT and makes it difficult for others to penetrate.

Cloud Computing and leveraging your technology in Cloud has become and becoming everyone’s busines and operations model. There is no denying that this is NOT going to change. As organizations are building their digtal capabilities in and around Cloud, it is important to think about and reviewing their efforts to match their operational and strategic direction from time to time.

If you have any questions or would like more information on how your business could benefit from the Cloud then you may contact me. If you are thinking about starting your Digital Transofrmation journey or actively involved in that process, then I would like to learn more.