Monthly Archives: July 2020
Hunting the Dread Gazebo of Repatriation
(Confused by the title of this post? Read this brief anecdote.)
The myth of cloud repatriation refuses to die, and a good chunk of the problem is that users (and poll respondents) use “repatriation” is a wild array of ways, but non-cloud vendors want you to believe that “repatriation” means enterprises packing up all their stuff in the cloud and moving it back into their internal data centers — which occurs so infrequently that it’s like a sasquatch sighting.
A non-comprehensive list of the ways that clients use the term “repatriation” that have little to nothing to do with what non-cloud vendors (or “hybrid”) would like you to believe:
Outsourcing takeback. The origin of the term comes from orgs that are coming back from traditional IT outsourcing. However, we also hear cloud architects say they are “repatriating” when they gradually take back management of cloud workloads from a cloud MSP; the workloads stay in the cloud, though.
Migration pause. Some migrations to IaaS/IaaS+PaaS do not go well. This is often the result of choosing a low-quality MSP for migration assistance, or rethinking the wisdom of a lift-and-shift. Orgs will pause, switch MSPs and/or switch migration approaches (usually to lift-and-optimize), and then resume. Some workloads might be temporarily returned on-premise while this occurs.
SaaS portfolio rationalization. Sprawling adoption of SaaS, at the individual, team, department or business-unit level, can result in one or more SaaS applications being replaced with other, official, corporate SaaS (for instance, replacing individual use of Dropbox with an org-wide Google Drive implementation as part of G-Suite). Sometimes, the org might choose to build on-premises functionality instead (for instance, replacing ad-hoc SaaS analytics with an on-prem data warehouse and enterprise BI solution). This is overwhelmingly the most common form of “cloud repatriation”.
Development in the cloud, production on premises. While the dev/prod split of environments is much less common than it used to be, some organizations still develop in cloud IaaS and then run the app in an on-prem data center in production. Orgs like this will sometimes say they “repatriate” the apps for production.
The Oops. Sometimes organizations attempt to put an application in the cloud and it Just Doesn’t Go Well. Sometimes the workload isn’t a good match for cloud services in general. Sometimes the workload is just a bad match for the particular provider chosen. Sometimes they make a bad integrator choice, or their internal cloud skills are inadequate to the task. Whatever it is, people might hit the “abort” button and either rethink and retry in the cloud, or give up and put it on premises (either until they can put together a better plan, or for the long term).
Of course, there are the sasquatch sightings, too, like the Dropbox migration from AWS (also see the five-year followup), but those stories rarely represent enterprise-comparable use cases. If you’re one of the largest purchasers of storage on the planet, and you want custom hardware, absolutely, DIY makes sense. (And Dropbox continues to do some things on AWS.)
Customers also engage in broader strategic application portfolio rationalizations that sometimes result in groups of applications being shifted around, based on changing needs. While the broader movement is towards the cloud, applications do sometimes come back on-premises, often to align to data gravity considerations for application and data integration.
None of these things are in any way equivalent to the notion that there’s a broad or even common movement of workloads from the cloud back on-premises, though, especially for those customers who have migrated entire data centers or the vast majority of their IT estate to the cloud.
(Updated with research: In my note for Gartner clients, “Moving Beyond the Myth of Repatriation: How to Handle Cloud Projects Failures”, I provide detailed guidance on why cloud projects fail, how to reduce the risks of such projects, and how — or if — to rescue troubled cloud projects.)
Building multicloud expertise
Building cloud expertise is hard. Building multicloud expertise is even harder. By “multicloud” in this context, I mean “adopting, within your organization, multiple cloud providers that do something similar” (such as adopting both AWS and Azure).
Integrated IaaS+PaaS providers are complex and differentiated entities, in both technical and business aspects. Add in their respective ecosystems — and the way that “multicloud” vendors, managed service providers (MSPs) etc. often deliver subtly (or obviously) different capabilities on different cloud providers — and you can basically end up with a multicloud katamari that picks up whatever capabilities it randomly rolls over. You can’t treat them like commodities (a topic I cover extensively in my research note on Managing Vendor Lock-In in Cloud IaaS).
For this reason, cloud-successful organizations that build a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE), or even just try to wrap their arms around some degree of formalized cloud operations and governance, almost always start by implementing a single cloud provider but plan for a multicloud future.
Successfully multicloud organizations have cloud architects that deeply educate themselves on a single provider, and their cloud team initially builds tools and processes around a single provider — but the cloud architects and engineers also develop some basic understanding of at least one additional provider in order to be able to make more informed decisions. Some basic groundwork is laid for a multicloud future, often in the form of frameworks, but the actual initial implementation is single-cloud.
Governance and support for a second strategic cloud provider is added at a later date, and might not necessarily be at the same level of depth as the primary strategic provider. Scenario-specific (use-case-specific or tactical) providers are handled on a case-by-case basis; the level of governance and support for such a provider may be quite limited, or may not be supported through central IT at all.
Individual cloud engineers may continue to have single-cloud rather than multicloud skills, especially because being highly expert in multiple cloud providers tend to boost market-rate salaries to levels that many enterprises and mid-market businesses consider untenable. (Forget using training-cost payback as a way to retain people; good cloud engineers can easily get a signing bonus more than large enough to deal with that.)
In other words: while more than 80% of organizations are multicloud, very few of them consider their multiple providers to be co-equal.
Refining the Cloud Center of Excellence
What sort of org structures work well for helping to drive successful cloud adoption? Every day I talk to businesses and public-sector entities about this topic. Some have been successful. Others are struggling. And the late-adopters are just starting out and want to get it right from the start.
Back in 2014, I started giving conference talks about an emerging industry best practice — the “Cloud Center of Excellence” (CCOE) concept. I published a research note at the start of 2019 distilling a whole bunch of advice on how to build a CCOE, and I’ve spent a significant chunk of the last year and a half talking to customers about it. Now I’ve revised that research, turning it into a hefty two-part note on How to Build a Cloud Center of Excellence: part 1 (organizational design) and part 2 (Year 1 tasks).
Gartner’s approach to the CCOE is fundamentally one that is rooted in the discipline of enterprise architecture and the role of EA in driving business success through the adoption of innovative technologies. We advocate a CCOE based on three core pillars — governance (cost management, risk management, etc.), brokerage (solution architecture and vendor management), and community (driving organizational collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and cloud best practices surfaced organically).
Note that it is vital for the CCOE to be focused on governance rather than on control. Organizations who remain focused on control are less likely to deliver effective self-service, or fully unlock key cloud benefits such as agility, flexibility and access to innovation. Indeed, IT organizations that attempt to tighten their grip on cloud control often face rebellion from the business that actually decreases the power of the CIO and the IT organization.
Also importantly, we do not think that the single-vendor CCOE approaches (which are currently heavily advocated by the professional services organizations of the hyperscalers) are the right long-term solution for most customers. A CCOE should ideally be vendor-neutral and span IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS in a multicloud world, with a focus on finding the right solutions to business problems (which may be cloud or noncloud). And a CCOE is not an IaaS/PaaS operations organization — cloud engineering/operations is a separate set of organizational decisions (I’ll have a research note out on that soon, too).
Please dive into the research (Gartner paywall) if you are interested in reading all the details. I have discussed this topic with literally thousands of clients over the last half-dozen years. If you’re a Gartner for Technical Professionals client, I’d be happy to talk to you about your own unique situation.
Finally, private cloud identical to public cloud
Preface added 20 November 2020: This post received a lot more attention than I expected. I must reiterate that it is not in any way an endorsement. Indeed, sparkly pink unicorns are, by their nature, fanciful. Caution must be exercised, as sparkly pink glitter can conceal deficiencies in the equine body.
Digging into my archive of past predictions… In a research note on the convergence of public and private cloud, published almost exactly eight years ago in July 2012, I predicted that the cloud IaaS market would eventually deliver a service that delivered a full public cloud experience as if it were private cloud — at the customer’s choice of data center, in a fully single-tenant fashion.
Since that time, there have been many attempts to introduce public-cloud-consistent private cloud offerings. Gartner now has a term, “distributed cloud”, to refer to the on-premises and edge services delivered by public cloud providers. AWS Outposts deliver, as a service, a subset of AWS’s incredibly rich product porfolio. Azure Stack (now Azure Stack Hub) delivers, as software, a set of “Azure-consistent” capabilities (meaning you can transfer your scripts, tooling, conceptual models, etc., but it only supports a core set of mostly infrastructure capabilities). Various cloud MSPs, notably Avanade, will deliver Azure Stack as a managed service. And folks like IBM and Google want you to take their container platform software to facilitate a hybrid IT model.
But no one has previously delivered what I think is what customers really want:
- Location of the customer’s choice
- Single-tenant; no other customer shares the hardware/service; data guaranteed to stay within the environment
- Isolated control plane and private self-service interfaces (portal, API endpoints); no tethering or dependence on the public cloud control plane, or Internet exposure of the self-service interfaces
- Delivered as a service with the same pricing model as the public cloud services; not significantly more expensive than public cloud as long as minimum commitment is met
- All of the provider’s services (IaaS+PaaS), identical to the way that they are exposed in the provider’s public cloud regions
Why do customers want that? Because customers like everything the public cloud has to offer — all the things, IaaS and PaaS — but there are still plenty of customers who want it on-premises and dedicated to them. They might need it somewhere that public cloud regions generally don’t live and may never live (small countries, small cities, edge locations, etc.), they might have regulatory requirements they believe they can only meet through isolation, they may have security (even “national security”) requirements that demand isolation, or they may have concerns about the potential to be cut off from the rest of the world (as the result of sanctions, for instance). And because when customers describe what they want, they inevitably ask for sparkly pink unicorns, they also want all that to be as cheap as a multi-tenant solution.
And now it’s here, and given that it’s 2020… the sparkly pink unicorn comes from Oracle. Specifically, the world now has Oracle Dedicated Regions Cloud @ Customer. (Which I’m going to shorthand as OCI-DR, even though you can buy Oracle SaaS hosted on this infrastructure) OCI’s region model, unlike its competitors, has always been all-services-in-all-regions, so the OCI-DR model continues that consistency.
In an OCI-DR deal, the customer basically provides colo (either their own data center or a third party colo) to Oracle, and Oracle delivers the same SLAs as it does in OCI public cloud. The commit is very modest — it’s $6 million a year, for a 3-year minimum, per OCI-DR Availability Zone (a region can have multiple AZs, and you can also buy multiple regions). There are plenty of cloud customers that easily meet that threshold. (The typical deal size we see for AWS contracts at Gartner is in the $5 to $15 million/year range, on 3+ year commitments.) And the pricing model and actual price for OCI-DR services is identical to OCI’s public regions.
The one common pink sparkly desire that OCI doesn’t meet is the ability to use your own hardware, which can help customers address capex vs. opex desires, may have perceived cost advantages, and may address secure supply chain requirements. OCI-DR uses some Oracle custom hardware, and the hardware is bundled as part of the service.
I predict that this will raise OCI’s profile as an alternative to the big hyperscalers, among enterprise customers and even among digital-native customers. Prior to today’s announcement, I’d already talked to Gartner clients who had been seriously engaged in sales discussions on OCI-DR; Oracle has quietly been actively engaged in selling this for some time. Oracle has made significant strides (surprisingly so) in expanding OCI’s capabilities over this last year, so when they say “all services” that’s now a pretty significant portfolio — likely enough for more customers to give OCI a serious look and decide whether access to private regions is worth dealing with the drawbacks (OCI’s more limited ecosystem and third-party tool support probably first and foremost).
As always, I’m happy to talk to Gartner clients who are interested in a deeper discussion. We’ve recently finished our Solution Scorecards (an in-depth assessment of 270 IaaS+PaaS capabilities), including our new assessment of OCI. The scores are summarized in a publicly-reprinted document. The full scorecard has been published, and the publicly-available summary says, “OCI’s overall solution score is 62 out of 100, making it a scenario-specific option for technical professionals responsible for cloud production deployments.”
Outside help can accelerate cloud journeys
Note: It’s been a while since I blogged actively, and I’m attempting to return to writing short-form posts on a regular basis.
In my current role within Gartner for Technical Professionals, I talk to a lot of cloud architects, engineers, and other technical individual contributors who are concerned that seeking outside assistance for cloud implementations will lead to long-term outsourcing, lack of self-sufficiency, lack of internal cloud skills, and loss of control. (The CIOs I talk to may have similar concerns, although typically more related to CIO-level concerns about outsourcing.)
Those concerns are real, but getting expert outside assistance — from a cloud managed service provider (MSP), consultancy / professional services provider / systems integrator, or even an individual contractor — doesn’t have to mean a sliding down a slippery slope into cloud helplessness.
Things I’ve learned over the past 5+ years of client conversations:
- Use of expert external assistance accelerates and improves cloud adoption. Organizations can strongly benefit from expert assistance. Such assistance reduces implementation times, raises implementation quality, lowers implementation costs as well as long-term total cost of ownership, and provides a better foundation for the organization to enhance its cloud usage in the future.
- Low-quality external assistance can have a devastating impact on cloud outcomes. Choosing the wrong vendor can be highly damaging, resulting in wasted resources, and failure to achieve either the expected business or technical outcomes.
- There must be a skills transition plan in place. Unless the organization expects to outsource cloud operations or application development over the long term, the MSP or consultancy must be contractually obligated to transfer knowledge and skills to the organization’s internal employees. This transfer must occur gradually, over a multi-month or even multi-year period. It is insufficient to do a “handoff” at the end of the contract. The organization needs to shift into a new mode of working as well as gain cloud competence, and this is best done collaboratively, with the external experts handing over responsibilities on a gradual basis.
- The organization needs to retain responsibility for cloud strategy and governance. It is dangerous for organizations to hand over strategic planning to an external vendor, as it is unlikely that plans produced by an external party will be optimally aligned to the organization’s business needs. For similar reasons, the organization also needs to retain responsibility for governance, including the creation of policy. An external party may be able to provide useful advice and implementation assistance, but should not be allowed to make strategy or policy decisions
You can cut years off your migration efforts, and significantly accelerate getting your foundations laid (building a Cloud Center of Excellence, etc.) by getting the right entity to do at least some of it with you, rather than doing all of it for you.
CloudPundit: Massive-Scale Computing 