This is a continuation of an article that describes operational considerations for hosting solutions on Azure public cloud.

There are several references to best practices throughout the series of articles we wrote from the documentation for the Azure Public Cloud. The previous article focused on the antipatterns to avoid, specifically the cloud readiness antipatterns. This article describes ways to manage the antipatterns.

Antipatterns are experienced when planning a cloud adoption. They can be avoided using tools and automations.

One of the antipatterns is about tooling itself. Modern IT tools support several automations which are helpful towards relieving employees of their tedious tasks. But the most important part of the tooling is their business outcome. Focusing on the tooling but not the business outcome is one of the difficult tasks and a common antipattern. One way to overcome this involves measuring the usefulness or impact of the tool. A new or modernized tool chain does not automatically provide faster delivery or better business outcomes.

Platforms are yet another case where they don’t always improve performance. A platform brings lots of desirable advantages. These include conformance, consistency, maintenance, simplicity, automation and hiding of differences between those that it manages. A CI/CD pipeline can serve as a platform for standardized processes and governance that brings tremendous value to different business units and allows them to deploy features faster. But while platforms improve the speed of certain processes, the overall execution time may still be hampered by approvals or release criteria. The platform cannot guarantee that it will work any better or faster that it was under the circumstances. This antipattern can also be avoided by measuring the usefulness or impact of the platform.

One of the ways of measuring usefulness or impact is defining SMART objectives which requires specific, measurable, achievable, reasonable and timebound goals. With the goals written this way, the commitments are clear, the progress indicated, and the deliverables held accountable. The caveat here is that improper metrics should not justify business impact or usefulness. Faster deployment alone is not an indicator of success, but it is critical to the overall impact.

Development team empowerment is a specific goal that tremendously improves business outcomes. It is also well-studied and structured for organizations to follow. Revenue growth, operating margin and higher innovations can all be improved with developer velocity.