All businesses are on a similar journey, with the need to build and support modern applications, whether they are newly developed or refactored. When driving the development and support of these applications, the company culture, and personnel, will dictate success. That means the responsibility for setting the guidelines of the business falls onto the leader(s) in that business. So how do you build a culture in a Multicloud world?

Organizations are dependent on 5 types of leaders to be successful in their Multicloud journey:

1. The C suite executive
2. The development leader
3. The product owner
4. The chief architect
5. The operational leader

If these 5 roles are not staffed with people with the right skills, the rest of the organization will not be able to transform, nor operate a Multicloud architecture.

All organizations rely on the senior leadership team to be the transformative spark. These folks need to be able to make the hard decisions, but also to show a level of humility. Everything these people do will cascade down through the organization either enabling transformation or impeding it. When you are driving modern application development in a multicloud architecture, there is a certain amount of risk mixed with the need to enable a fast fail culture. These leaders are required to put the cultural guardrails in place that the rest of the organization will follow.

Once a culture's code has been established senior leadership and the development leader need to drive the daily part of the transformation. If an organization is approaching their development lifecycle as they have for the past 20 years, it is going to fail. There needs to be the ability to deliver in a real agile manner, not just saying the word agile. They need to live and breathe the best practices starting with the development leadership. As well, the development leader needs to continue the trend of enabling their teams through the practice of hands-off enablement. Allow the employees to take risks, make decisions, fail as they learn, and drive to be efficient. Through continuous learning, the team will deliver at a better pace and with better efficiencies.

Once the culture is properly defined and development/delivery best practices are in use, the product needs to be properly defined. This is where the real transformation effort takes shape, because when agile and cloud native principles are applied during the product scoping, then it becomes natural for the delivery teams to function as defined. The product owner needs to deliver a vision that encompasses the user experience, the user journey, the scaling requirements, and the functional requirements. In this multicloud world, this should not be an extended multi-year vision though. How can anyone define something for 5 or even 6 years away? The vision needs to be a solid 2-3-year high-level concept, but this quickly needs to be scoped down into quick iterative chunks. These deliverables should be in the 3- 6-month range for initial delivery with a notion of continuous delivery post v1. If the product owner doesn't operate on this model, the methodologies the development leader has defined will not work, and the teams will revert to their old ways of functioning.

Through all the previous roles there is a combination of operating model, culture, and vision that enable the Multicloud transformation effort, but a missing ingredient is how to build it from an architectural perspective. The chief architect needs to define some best practices for the transformation to work. Common questions they need to deal with for example are:

1. Do we need to do a microservices architecture or more monolithic?
2. What is the data model and architecture we want to use?
3. How much open source / off-the-shelf software do we want vs. purpose-built modules?
4. How do we satisfy the defined UX API and GUI?
5. Do we need to scale the architecture across multiple sites/zones/clouds?
6. How do we protect against all security threat vectors?

The chief architect will also need to ensure they are not the bottleneck for decision-making. In this Multicloud and modern application culture, they need to enable their more senior developers by setting the guardrails, making some of the harder decisions, and keeping an active pulse of all decisions being made by others.

The final role is one of the most important because this is an area that is the hardest to transform, the operational leader. Most IT and support organizations are extremely set in their ways due to decades of operating enterprise applications. They usually have some very set processes in place and changing these is hard. The pain is not just in changing other actual processes, but it is in training the people to think in a more cloud native way.

This is where concepts such as DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering have been established. The operational leader needs to build a game plan for how they organize their folks and train their folks while supporting the traditional business and the Multicloud side of the business. An easy way to do this is to create smaller teams that are tasked with modernizing different aspects of the operational model. When designating these teams, they need to be created so that the newer skill sets will be transferred to inexperienced operators and admins. A subject matter expert paired with a few of these inexperienced folks will more quickly get the business to scale up its knowledge base. 

If you are one of these people in your company, you must be the ignition for the transformation. You cannot rely on someone else to do it for you. Your people and business are relying on you to drive the DNA, culture, vision, technology, and operating model. Without you pushing the envelope, transformation is exponentially harder.

++

Join us at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America this November 6 - 9 in Chicago for more on Kubernetes and the cloud native ecosystem. 

##

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brad Maltz is the Sr. Director of DevOps and Developer Relations Ecosystems at Dell Technologies, focusing on delivering DevOps technologies and a developer-oriented user experience with the Dell portfolio. He leads a team that is connecting Dell to the community to enable our customers on their journey to becoming mature DevOps organizations. Brad has been in the industry for over 20 years driving innovation and solutions across the strategic technology landscape.

With experience across multiple verticals such as healthcare, finance, biotech, education, government and manufacturing, Brad has been able to help customers with a multitude of problems up and down the technology stack.