If you’re here reading this, you’re likely already at least playing in the cloud. As I talked about in the last post, my review of the recent updates to the Well-Architected Framework Data and Analytics Lens has me in a reflective mood. I’ve kept revisiting the subject since I first put together a presentation on it in Spring 2019.
Just thinking about the “Well-Architected” terminology makes my mind move towards optimization but that optimal state can change. In addition, the scenario that you’re optimizing for adds complexity to that decision making process. While it’s not 12 dimensional chess, it’s definitely not checkers either. I was looking at the scenarios listed in this release and Data Discovery has been added as a scenario where it hadn’t previously existed in the 2020 version that I looked at for comparison. In addition to shaping things for the long haul, I suppose it makes sense that there’s an optimal way to look into new opportunities and figuring out what you’re actually going to do as well.
All of this points toward making this revisit / review process something that should be more than opportunistic. It’s important to regularly look at how existing things are doing, what new solutions are being developed, and what the market has changed underneath it all. Thinking about that, my pragmatic side takes over. Time is money, and all else being equal, taking a harder look at those parts of a cloud environment that are costing the most has the highest potential ROI.
When considering how to begin looking at a cloud environment that has grown up in a somewhat unregulated way, there’s a pretty clear path: addressing low hanging fruit, refining existing architecture, putting in place controls, and then regularly monitoring it all for changes while looking for opportunities to improve things. That said, question number one is how much visibility and understanding do you have around the costs incurred operating in the environment? The built in tools give you some very basic abilities, but they are a little clunky when trying to gain true insights. It’s pretty telling in my mind that Cost Optimization is important enough that it is one of the six pillars that make up the whole foundation of the framework.
The cost monitoring and management space is something that I’ve thought about quite a bit, and it’s something that I’ll continue to come back to in this space. Business requirements will and always should drive what it is you’re trying to achieve with your cloud architecture, but balancing cost optimization with those requirements can and always should drive HOW the business goes about building and operating those solutions within the cloud. And the only way to do that over the long term is to get on that Merry-go-round and keep coming back to that thought process and figure it all out again.
Finding Order in the Chaos 