Many of my client inquiries deal with the seemingly overwhelming complexity of maturing cloud adoption — especially with the current wave of pandemic-driven late adopters, who are frequently facing business directives to move fast but see only an immense tidal wave of insurmountably complex tasks.

A lot of my advice is focused on starting small — or at least tackling reasonably-scoped projects. The following is specifically applicable to IaaS / IaaS+PaaS:

Build a cloud center of excellence. You can start a CCOE with just a single person designated as a cloud architect. Standing up a CCOE is probably going to take you a year of incremental work, during which cloud adoption, especially pilot projects, can move along. You might have to go back and retroactively apply governance and good practices to some projects. That’s usually okay.

Start with one cloud. Don’t go multicloud from the start. Do one. Get good at it (or at least get a reasonable way into a successful implementation). Then add another. If there’s immediate business demand (with solid business-case justifications) for more than one, get an MSP to deal with the additional clouds.

Don’t build a complex governance and ops structure based on theory. Don’t delay adoption while you work out everything you think you’ll need to govern and manage it. If you’ve never used cloud before, the reality may be quite different than you have in your head. Run a sequence of increasingly complex pilot projects to gain practical experience while you do preparatory work in the background. Take the lessons learned and apply them to that work.

Don’t build massive RFPs to choose a provider. Almost all organizations are better off considering their strategic priorities and then matching a cloud provider to those priorities. (If priorities are bifurcated between running the legacy and building new digital capabilities, this might encourage two strategic providers, which is fine and commonplace.) Massive RFPs are a lot of work and are rarely optimal. (Government folks might have no choice, unfortunately.)

Don’t try to evaluate every service.  Hyperscale cloud providers have dozens upon dozens of services. You won’t use all of them. Don’t bother to evaluate all of them. If you think you might use a service in the future, and you want to compare that service across providers… well, by the time you get around to implementing it, all of the providers will have radically updated that service, so any work you do now will be functionally useless. Look just at the services that you are certain you will use immediately and in the very near (no more than one year) future. Validate a subset of services for use, and add new validations as needed later on.

Focus on thoughtful workload placement. Decide who your approved and preferred providers are, and build a workload placement policy. Look for “good technical fit” and not necessarily ideal technical fit; integration affinities and similar factors are more important. The time to do a detailed comparison of an individual service’s technical capabilities is when deciding workload placement, not during the RFP phase.

Accept the limits of cloud portability. Cloud providers don’t and will probably never offer commoditized services. Even when infrastructure resources seem superficially similar, there are still meaningful differences, and the management capabilities wrapped around those resources are highly differentiated. You’re buying into ecosystems that have the long-term stickiness of middleware and management software. Don’t waste time on single-pane-of-glass no-lock-in fantasies, no matter how glossily pretty the vendor marketing material is. And no, containers aren’t magic in this regard.

Links are to Gartner research and are paywalled.