Public Cloud Challenges

Providing direct cloud accounts to your application teams offers a quick way to unblock them and enable access to required services, but also presents drawbacks:

• Expensive. Cloud offerings are not cheap. By giving every team non-restricted access to cloud resources, organisations run the risk of high costs. Teams may not focus on fine-tuning the resources they are requesting. Services may be spun up for tests and forgotten, leading to waste. It’s common for organisations to run a “spring cleaning” on many accounts, stopping work for a period of time to concentrate efforts in reducing their cloud bills.

• Duplication of resources across teams. As each team is managing their own workflows there is duplication of effort. For example, each team spinning up a CI/CD system that could be shared, or the same set of problems being solved by many different teams, leading to waste of collective organisation time.

• Lack of compliance and governance. Application teams are free to configure the resources, which makes enforcing internal compliance and governance rules difficult.

• Cognitive load. Application teams need to become experts on how to use cloud services. Developing this expertise takes time away from the core work that application teams should be focused on.

• Cloud lock-in. As teams become accustomed to a specific cloud's tooling, switching to another provider (for reasons such as better deals or different services) becomes difficult and costly. Teams across the organisation may need to learn an entire new stack, leading to more wasted time and effort.

App teams go directly to the cloud to get the services they need