Accelerate your cloud migration: A leader’s guide to going fast (MAM212)

Here is a detailed summary of the video transcription in markdown format:

Key Takeaways

  1. Migrations can be accelerated by focusing on empowering internal teams and embracing constraints.
  2. Invest in upskilling existing employees rather than outsourcing the entire migration process.
  3. Obtain buy-in from all stakeholders, including leadership, peers, and the migration team.
  4. Leverage a lightweight and iterative approach to migration, rather than extensive planning.
  5. Embrace constraints and set challenging deadlines to drive innovation and faster execution.
  6. Establish a scalable, non-blocking, and multi-threaded migration process to maintain momentum.

Detailed Summary

The Speaker's Background and Expertise

  • The speaker, Jake Burns, is an Enterprise Strategist at AWS.
  • He has extensive experience leading large-scale cloud transformations and migrations while working at organizations like Live Nation and Ticketmaster.
  • The speaker has had over a thousand engagements with senior leaders of large organizations, giving him a unique perspective on what works and what doesn't in cloud migrations.

Lessons Learned from a Successful Migration

  • The speaker led an "all-in" migration to AWS at Live Nation, which was completed in 17 months.
  • This migration resulted in a 48% reduction in total IT cost of ownership, 72-hour app deployment times (previously 6 months), and increased service-level resiliency from 39% to 59%.

The Challenge of Cloud Adoption

  • Despite the desire to move to the cloud, the speaker observes that many organizations are still struggling to succeed or move as quickly as they would like.
  • This is often due to a lack of guidance on how to effectively execute cloud migrations.

Investing in Internal Teams

  • The speaker advocates for investing in and upskilling existing employees rather than outsourcing the entire migration process.
  • Hiring cloud engineers from scratch can be challenging, as it is often easier to teach cloud skills to existing IT staff than to teach them how the organization operates.
  • Upskilling internal teams also helps foster a more positive attitude towards cloud adoption, as it mitigates the fear of being "engineered out of a job."

Overcoming Challenges with Internal Teams

  1. Busyness: Acknowledge that existing IT teams are often too busy with their day-to-day responsibilities to dedicate time to the migration.
  2. Fear: Recognize that employees may be fearful of the unknown and uncertain about the impact of the cloud on their roles.
  3. Lack of Motivation: Ensure that employees understand the "what's in it for them" and how the cloud adoption will benefit them professionally.

Outsourcing the "Undifferentiated" Work

  • Rather than outsourcing the entire migration, the speaker suggests outsourcing the "undifferentiated" or repetitive work to free up internal teams to focus on learning and executing the migration.
  • This allows the internal team to become the experts who will ultimately support the new cloud-based infrastructure.

Obtaining Buy-in

  1. Explain the "Why": Tie the cloud migration to the organization's broader business objectives and how it will benefit customers.
  2. Share the Plan: Communicate the migration plan and be open to feedback to foster a sense of shared ownership.
  3. Highlight the Benefits: Emphasize the personal and professional benefits for employees, such as upskilling and increased career opportunities.

Building a Cloud Team

  • The speaker recommends establishing a dedicated "cloud team" within the organization, rather than relying on a traditional "Center of Excellence" approach.
  • This cloud team should be a meritocracy, with roles and requirements determined by the team itself.
  • Senior members of the cloud team should be responsible for mentoring and training new members to create a self-sustaining, high-performing team.

Rapid Landing Zone Creation

  • The speaker suggests that the landing zone, which is the foundational cloud infrastructure, should be built quickly (in days or weeks, not months or years).
  • The key components of a landing zone include a root account, multiple application accounts, network connectivity, and access control.
  • The cloud team should build the landing zone, as this will help them become familiar with the environment they will be migrating to.

Infrastructure as Code

  • The speaker acknowledges the pros and cons of using infrastructure as code (IaC) but emphasizes the importance of maintaining discipline and consistency in its application.
  • Benefits of IaC include self-documentation, consistency across environments, version control, and reusable components.
  • Challenges include the learning curve and the need for strict discipline in its application.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery

  • The speaker recommends spreading EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones, and in some cases, spanning multiple AWS Regions for high availability.
  • For disaster recovery, the focus should be on replicating data rather than replicating the entire environment, which can be costly.
  • Consideration should be given to having a completely separate set of access controls for disaster recovery data, to mitigate risks.

Migration Approach

  1. Assessment and Inventory: Quickly consolidate existing application and infrastructure data to create a migration plan, without extensive upfront analysis.
  2. Minimal Viable Refactoring: Rather than adhering to the "7 Rs" framework, focus on a "lift and shift" approach with the minimum viable refactoring to ensure no degradation in security, compliance, reliability, performance, or cost.
  3. Sequenced, Non-Blocking Migration: Establish a multi-threaded, iterative migration process that can route around blockers and keep the momentum going.

Principles for Successful Migrations

  1. Embrace Constraints: Set challenging deadlines and embrace constraints as a forcing function for innovation.
  2. Scalable Methodology: Ensure the migration approach is scalable and can be applied across different industries and organization sizes.
  3. Empower Employees: Recognize that motivated and supported employees can achieve anything, while unsupported employees can undermine the entire process.

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