Jarrett Coggin

To Cloud or Not to Cloud

Focus.

What is your focus today? What is your company’s focus in totality? What is your team’s focus this quarter? What is your life’s focus in the grand scheme until you die?

Apple is legendary in the focus game because they strongly focus on design and usability to accomplish their goals. Amazon is legendary in the focus game because they strongly focus technological advancement and opportunity to provide goods and services to others. Google is legendary in the focus game because they have essentially asked the question, “What if a software engineer was responsible for providing this on the web?”

Focus is why choosing to run on cloud technologies like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, or a whole host of other services is so important to tech companies. In order to decide your focus, you have to answer two questions: “How do I make money?” and “How do I functionally make that money?”

In other words, you have to decide what you are offering to the world that you expect others to pay for and you have to decide how you are going to make that money. While answering these questions, you have to also decide which of the two answers come first. What are you willing to be flexible on?

Every organization must tackle things that actually add up to success. In the early days of startups, this is critical or the company will fail. In larger organizations, the company might not fail with a failed initiative, but they may have burned a lot of money to try an idea out and might not be in as strong of a position to address the competition.

Consider SmallCo, a company that is trying to figure out whether they should build out a technology platform internally or go with a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services. Building a self-hosted platform gives them the ability to control their own destiny (for better or worse) and will take years to develop, but doesn’t have the dreaded “vendor lock-in”. Buying a platform from someone like Amazon, Microsoft, or Google allows them to offload a lot of hard decisions onto another company and advance SmallCo’s tech platform by a decade, but then they are stuck with that vendor until they decide to switch to some other approach.

You’ll always be working with a vendor for the technology platform though. That’s one of the key things companies miss. You may be using Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, or someone else as your tech platform vendor. You may have decided to vendor this gargantuan task to yourself by hiring an internal team, usually called something like Systems Engineering, Systems Administration, Operations, Platform Engineering, Internal Technologies, or some other phrase.

I’ve worked at a fair number of companies during my professional career and I’ve seen a lot of different approaches to this problem. I’ve seen a huge company that had a strong tech platform built out in a previous do-it-yourself era that allowed them to move very quickly because they had gone through the pain of engineering a whole lot of tech goodness. On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve seen a company that bought services for everything that wasn’t their core competency, which was working on their product that they sold to customers.

I’ve also seen in-between. This is where things can be fatal. This is where things aren’t done well and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears are wasted because of the constant churn to go between a “buy the technology” culture to a “build and run the technology” culture and back again. This is where focus becomes key.

Making the change to switch from one culture to the other has to be the main focus for the company if they truly want to make the switch. Everything else has to be enabling that focus to really come to fruition. If you want to make the switch, put everything else on pause to actually make that switch successfully. You can’t support both approaches forever. You can’t innovate on both approaches when you have the same people managing both approaches. The quicker you try to make the transition, the more violent the transition will be. You can also make this “build versus buy” decision on a case by case basis. You can buy the tool until you are a larger company that can adeptly manage the built solution.

There is no right or wrong answer. However you decide to tackle the “To Cloud or Not To Cloud” problem, make sure you remember where your focus is and let that be the guiding principle.