Engineering End-to-End Velocity in the Cloud

Cloud adoption is often touted as the key to any successful digital transformation. And yet, for the majority of organisations, migrating to the Cloud is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to driving growth. In this article, we reveal how a cloud engineering strategy can deliver the end-to-end velocity your business needs to evolve at speed and scale.

Traditional companies with legacy IT infrastructure are migrating to the Cloud in growing numbers, and the biggest cloud providers are all competing for their attention. However, beyond the initial hardware and licensing cost savings, simply moving to, or operating in the Cloud seldom delivers dramatically improved business outcomes.

The ability to deliver highly performant applications and services at speed and scale relies on having a robust cloud engineering approach encompassing architecture, design, code, DevOps, agile processes, and everything in between.

While unlocking velocity in the Cloud doesn’t happen overnight, the good news is there are steps your business can take to create the roadmap to get there. Read on to find out why cloud engineering is business-critical in 2022, the key components of a highly performant cloud engine, and how we can help you unlock end-to-end commercial velocity at scale.

In today’s fast-moving digital world, customers expect a flexible, speedy and streamlined service across multiple channels. This is leading to a growing number of businesses embracing the Cloud for the agility and scalability it brings.

From a technical standpoint, the increased popularity and extensibility of Kubernetes and infrastructure as code (IaC) presents numerous opportunities for businesses, including service discovery and the ability to horizontally scale with ease, driving revenue.

However, from a commercial perspective, the shift from on-premise architecture to the Cloud can be a significant adjustment, turning familiar cost, security and ownership models on their heads. The rise of microservices and container orchestration has introduced new challenges, driving changes in traditional site reliability engineer (SRE) responsibilities.

And it’s not just different ways of working that are presenting a challenge. When organisations move to the Cloud, they don’t necessarily have the skills to operate in, or make the most of it. Moreover, if skill gaps aren’t promptly addressed, they’ll undoubtedly widen over time, resulting in increased obstacles and complexity.

Successful migrations call for not only cloud expertise, but knowledge and experience surrounding container orchestration, Kubernetes and more. But how do you create a strong developer experience and drive productivity so that developers aren’t constantly working on either the infrastructure or platform alone? Many organisations are beginning to consider whether they need a dedicated platform engineering team.

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To plan and implement your cloud engineering strategy successfully, you need a purpose-built team with the knowledge, skills, and resources to develop and manage your organisation’s cloud environment. From Kubernetes to containers, newfound capabilities require dedicated resources.

With that said, here are the top three signs your business could benefit from a cloud engineering team:

If you’ve noticed significant overlap across your product teams, whether they’re working on very similar features, or trying to complete shared tasks, this is one of the most telling signs that your organisation could benefit from a dedicated platform engineering function.

If you find that you resonate with the above scenario, then it’s highly likely there are productivity and efficiency gains to be made. To deliver above the value line and accelerate delivery and innovation, you need to create a blueprint for scaling in the Cloud that’s entirely unique to your organisation.

Having a platform engineering team in place can help you achieve this, eliminating duplicate work and freeing up resources to focus on driving velocity across your products and services. This will not only enhance productivity, but improve the overall developer experience (DevEx), which is core to attracting and retaining the top technical talent.

And finally, if cloud adoption is high on your business’ agenda, then you’re going to need a dedicated platform engineering team to manage your cloud environment and drive incremental improvements.

Ensuring you attract the right types of developers with expertise in the specific technologies you’ll be working with is crucial. When considering introducing a platform engineering team, deciding whether to adopt a single or a multicloud approach is a great place to start. This will allow your organisation to define its skill requirements in detail and build the best possible team. Related Read: How Digital Partners Create Competitive Advantage

Whether your business is implementing a single cloud, multicloud or hybrid cloud environment, getting the fundamentals right from the outset is essential to achieving optimum performance, security, scalability and growth later on.

From setting up and integrating your chosen services, to the cloud development and delivery lifecycle, to design-time and run-time cloud management, we can help you get ahead. As consultants and practitioners, we’re well-versed in building highly scalable applications in the cloud for our leading enterprise customers.

Our agile approach and expertise surrounding automation using technologies such as Terraform , as well as Node.js for Kubernetes and microservices, can help you deliver new applications fast while reducing your operational overheads.

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