Rigorous standardisation the key to any shift into the cloud, advises IBM

"When you try and bend cloud into a shape it was never intended to take on you lose all the benefits," warns IBM's John Easton

Moving to the cloud means that organisations' IT departments must reconcile themselves to standardised services and sacrifice the kind of flexibility that in-house application implementations provide.

That is the warning of John Easton, distinguished engineer of the Watson Cloud Platform at IBM Hybrid Cloud, speaking at today's Computing Cloud and Infrastructure Summit 2017.

"In the old world, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted," Easton told the Cloud Summit, "If I needed four cores and a gigabyte of memory, this much storage and that networking adaptor, I could do that. I had the flexibility when I was building my own infrastructure to be able to specifically try to do things to meet my particular application and business needs."

The cloud, though, means bending around the kind of standardisation offered by the vendors. "The cloud is all about standardised services. We have moved away from having a large degree of flexibility to having to consume the standard services that the cloud provides," said Easton.

"That's great, as long as you can get into that mindset," he added. An oil company he met with recently had the attitude of assessing every cloud move closely.

"They were the first company I'd been with in a long time that said, 'we have to use the standardised services. We cannot built it the way we used to. If we can't build it out of standardised services, we ain't moving it to the cloud'," said Easton.

In other words, there's no point trying to replicate every last complication of an in-house application in the cloud, partly because it may not be possible, but also because it may entail lock-in and higher costs.

"When you try and bend cloud into a shape it was never intended to take on you basically lose all the benefits," warned Easton. "You don't get all the automation because trying to assemble some of these complicated environments [that you might have built in-house] means that the automation cannot work."

That's especially true if organisations are eyeing up cloud as a more cost-effective solution. "It will be significantly more expensive," he warns. "If you're looking at cloud as a way of automating and reducing the number of people required to keep a service up-and-running, as soon as you add this degree of complexity the number of people you need will go up and it will become a much more costly option."

He added: "Think of cloud as a set of standardised services, and if you cannot get into that mindset you are going to get into a lot of trouble."