AWS Journey: The Four Phases
Phase 1: This is awesome!
Let me tell you how the journey to Amazon Web Services starts for most customers - with an impossible deadline.
One of your colleagues stops by your desk on Friday and says they need the new system up and ready to go by Tuesday - fun times.
The team decides that now is the perfect time to try out AWS and since everyone has been wanted to give it a try anyways they all enthusiastically jump in to get the job done. Then something amazing happens - not only does the team deliver the request on time but finishes early! The customer is so impressed with the turnaround they tell others about how great the experience was.
You’re off to the races - good luck!
Phase 2: Hmm, maybe we need to rethink this
By now, the team is getting flooded with requests from other business units which (up until now) have been unable to meet shrinking timelines using traditional IT. That’s fantastic for your new venture - for a bit.
As the number of requests increases, delivery times start getting longer; the team starts making errors because they no longer can keep up.
The problem is you’re too far down the path to quickly change course. There’s so much work to do and so many issues to deal with that the team is too busy fighting fires - just like before AWS - to do anything about the fundamental issues with your current AWS strategy.
Phase 3: This is (way) tougher than we thought!
Things are starting to get ugly. You’re underwater.; components are failing; requests are coming in faster than the team can handle. People doubt both your team’s ability, but also Amazon itself.
Things are so bad, that if you’re honest with yourself, you were more efficient before moving to AWS - not the situation you thought you find yourself in just a few short months ago.
Phase 4: Making Progress
Luckily for you, your team is fantastic. Through all the growing pains they pushed on. They figured out how efficiently and effectively they can deploy solutions to customers using concepts like Infrastructure-as-Code. They figured out how to spend their time delivering value to their clients rather than manually monitoring and managing solutions by automating everyday tasks with tools like AWS Lambda and CI/CD pipelines.
Congratulations! It was a little scary there for a bit, but things are starting to look up for the team, and the organization is starting to see value again.
How do you avoid both Phase 2 & 3?
There’s no secret here. Reducing time to market is the real value of public cloud.
The problem is the majority of organizations attempt to leverage existing methods and workflows that have worked and been fine-tuned for years in a traditional hardware-based environment on AWS - an entirely software-based platform. You’re not going to see problems immediately, but trust me when I tell you there are there.
So, what do you do? You need to change the way you do things early on in the journey. You need to work hard to create a generative environment; you need to break down the silos which have existed between teams within your organization for years and foster more communication. You need to effectively manage expectations to give the team time to relearn how to do their jobs.
The value will be less at the beginning, and you won’t get the thrill of those quick wins, but in the long run, you’ll see more value in a shorter period.