Since 2017 I’ve been involved in a wide variety of “cloud” projects and there’s some common myths I’ve observed.
Migrations are just containers
Change is hard and unless you’re working for a startup, most cloud transformations start as lift and shift exercises. Contracts have been signed and everyone has been sold the myth that all you need to do is “dockerise” your containers and away you go.
Unfortunately, most of the hyperscalers (cloud provider - GCP, AWS, Azure, etc) will dazzle you with the way they’ve been doing things for years and just tell you and will instruct you to “do as they say”. However, for most regulated institutions there’s far stricter governance around things like Disaster Recovery and Data locality. For example, on a recent project we discovered that a certain cloud provider had two data centres located less than 50 miles apart. This simply wasn’t good enough for the regulated entity, a natural disaster could easily wipe out both data centers. I was amazed.
A lot of effort had already been spent in designing and architecting a system that could run on both data centres for fail-over. It pretty much had to be done again after the datacentre locality was discovered.
Everything is everywhere
Cloud providers split there cloud across “region” and “availability zones”. Not all the features/services are available in every region/zone. Successful deployment of your application in one region/zone does not guarantee success everywhere especially if you are relying on newer features/services.