Cloud Fallacy: Migrate and Figure it Out

how to avoid a common migration pitfall that can cost you BIG time

hello avatars, lets discuss a COSTLY fallacy that cloud providers and consultants tell their customers: “just migrate to the cloud and figure <roadblock> out later”. Not knowing how these people play the game can cost you time AND money, easy mistake to make that many do.

Cloud Migrations

Cloud migrations and digital transformations as the providers like to call them are serious bodies of multi-year work. I have worked on many cloud migrations, some of which being money printer finance applications with serious performance requirements, even for aws. When the enterprise began our migrations, one we hear often is “just migrate and figure out the <roadblock> piece later, you’ll be saving so much money.” Often times the roadblocks are security, governance, or a requirement. These people are getting paid to either migrate you, or once you migrate to the platform so they can lock you in. These providers have fantastic sales teams that say things like this and often times people dont realize how false that is. It gets worse the bigger you company is, as the wheels are harder to turn. Similar to how developers will say things like, “oh this is just the MVP, we’ll add <feature> in the final product.” and then it never gets added, same idea just different application.

Change is Hard

Anyone that works in technology knows that refactoring, reengineering, or redesigning anything requires serious effort. The risk of breaking something is usually enough to make squeamish engineering managers fight against changes. Now think, if providers say, “you can figure out the governance part later”, what are the chances you are really going to figure it out before things get out of control, governance controls are *difficult* to add after the fact.

Another part they are going to tell you is that, “you will be saving so much money, not migrating NOW is going to cost you” Hopefully you all read enough jungle substacks to realize that this is a classic sales technique of creating urgency and a feeling of losing or wasting money. Long time readers of mine will know this is just flat. out. *false* migrating to cloud will not instantly save you money. migrations itself are expensive and while you are growing to maturity you will be spending MORE before you gain mature on the platform and start realizing cost savings.

Knowing all of that, what are the chances you refactor or reengineer something once you have migrated it. Low.

Uncover the Solution

You need to have a solution. Day 0 jobs like defining your requirements, translating them to be cloud native, your account strategy, and defining budgets need to be done before migrating. If you think you are going to migrate and application then set up your security, logging, or certain networking, its going to be difficult and probably fail. Retroactively making these key changes is a recipe for disaster, as this is the groundwork you want laid to ensure your success. By creating these seemingly big problems, and the fact your company doesnt have the cloud knowledge to solve them, they have created an issue for you to hire them to fix. This is something i have seen many times. Of course they will never admit this, but cloud providers and consultants do this all the time.

Anecdotally, my company migrated our data lake to aws. we had concerns over the scalability of the data lake, because of some key design decisions. aws pressured us to migrate, and address those if they ever happen (i bet knowing they would happen). So leadership gave the ok and we migrated our data lake with over a petabyte of data. Less than a year after migration - what do you know we starting running into S3 service limits because of a design fault. So now after less than a year of the v1 release we are completely redesigning our data lake design, some key lessons learned are point out in this post. The resistance to redesigning such a huge part of the business was a tough decision to make, but in this case since it literally wont work as we are getting close to a S3 service limit, our feet were to the fire again. What do you know, AWS is offering us their trusty professional services to fix our issues, for a hefty fee of course.

Pushing Back

Providers and consultants want to get you migrated so they can begin locking you in. They know how powerful the platform is for lockin and how difficult it is to exit the platform. Even if it causes issues in the short term, over the long term its beneficial to them. You need to push back. Make sure that all of the day 0 governance, infrastructure, and processes are created and implemented. People want the instant gratification of migrating something, splicing the data to see some cost saving, and encouraging you to migrate more applications because of the success. Lay the ground work and do the due diligence of these boring day 0 tasks, it will be worth it in the long term. Cloud providers and consultants take advantage of the fact that most leaders without cloud experience are not aware of these caveats, and once they get you on the platform they got you hooked, and they know that.

The good news is that you follow me and heed my guidance so you can migrate and operate in the cloud successfully. Uncover cloud secrets and remove roadblocks to cloud migrations by upgrading your subscription to premium where I share secrets I have learned in the industry.

Additionally, feel free to DM me on twitter if you have specific aws cloud questions @bowtiedcelt