Responsibility for cloud operations is often a political football in enterprises. Sometimes nobody wants it; it’s a toxic hot potato that’s apparently coated in developer cooties. Sometimes everybody wants it, and some executives think that control over it are going to ensure their next promotion / a handsome bonus / attractiveness for their next job. Frequently, developers and the infrastructure & operations (I&O) orgs clash over it. Sometimes, CIOs decide to just stuff it into a Cloud Center of Excellence team which started out doing architecture and governance, and then finds itself saddled with everything else, too.

Lots of arguments are made for it to live in particular places and to be executed in various ways. There’s inevitably a clash between the “boring” stuff that is basically lifted-and-shifted and rarely changes, and the fast-moving agile stuff. And different approaches to IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. And and and…

Well, the fact of the matter is that multiple people are probably right. You don’t actually want to take a one-size-fits-all approach. You want to fit operational approaches to your business needs. And you maybe even want to have specialized teams for each major hyperscale provider, even if you adopt some common approaches across a multicloud environment. (Azure vs. non-Azure, i.e. Azure vs. AWS, is a common split, often correlated closely to Windows-based application environments vs Linux-based application environments.)

Ideally, you’re going to be highly automated, agile, cloud-native, and collaborative between developers and operators (i.e. DevOps). But maybe not for everything (i.e. not all apps are under active development).

Plus, once you’ve chosen your basic operations approach (or approaches), you have to figure out how you’re going to handle cloud configuration, release engineering, and security responsibilities. (And all the upskilling necessary to do that well!)

That’s where people tend to really get hung up. How much responsibility can I realistically push to my development teams? How much responsibility do they want? How do I phase in new operational approaches over time? How do I hook this into existing CI/CD, agile, and DevOps initiatives?

There’s no one right answer. However, there’s one answer that is almost always wrong, and that’s splitting cloud operations across the I&O functional silos — i.e., the server team deals with your EC2 VMs, your NetApp storage admin deals with your Azure Blobs, your F5 specialist configures your Google Load Balancers, your firewall team fights with  your network team over who controls the VPC config (often settled, badly, by buying firewall virtual appliances), etc.

When that approach is taken, the admins almost always treat the cloud portals like they’re the latest pointy-clicky interface for a piece of hardware. This pretty much guarantees incompetence, lack of coordination, and gross inefficiency. It’s usually terrible at regardless of what scale you’re at. Unfortunately, it’s also the first thing that most people try (closely followed by massively overburdening some poor cloud architect with Absolutely Everything Cloud-Related.)

What works for most orgs: Some form of cloud platform operations, where cloud management is treated like a “product”.  It’s almost an internal cloud MSP approach, where the cloud platform ops team delivers a CMP suite, cloud-enabled CI/CD pipeline integrations, templates and automation, other cloud engineering, and where necessary, consultative assistance to  coders and to application management teams. That team is usually on call for incident response, but the first line for incidents is usually the NOC or the like, and the org’s usual incident management team.

But there are lots of options. Gartner clients: Want a methodical dissection of pros and cons; cloud engineering, operating, and administration tasks; job roles; coder responsibilities; security integration; and other issues? Read my new note, “Comparing Cloud Operations Approaches“, which looks at eleven core patterns along with guidance for choosing between them, andmaking a range of accompanying decisions.