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|In: Cloud|Last Updated:

“Haven’t you read Amazon’s and Microsoft’s recent press releases on this?”

This was in response to a challenge to the “save money” argument for migrating applications to the public cloud.

I understand just as well as the next feller that press releases serve a valid purpose (what’s the feminine of “feller” anyway?). When a company has something important to announce, press releases are the more than 140 characters explanation of what’s going on.

That’s in contrast to the difference between facts (“We’re changing our pricing model”) and smoke (“You’ll save big money”). I say smoke because:

First and foremost, Fortune 500-size corporations that can’t negotiate pricing for servers and storage comparable to what Amazon and Microsoft pay for the gear they use to run AWS and Azure just aren’t trying very hard. They have access to the same technology management tools, practices, and talent, too.

Second: Smart companies are building their new applications using cloud-native architectures — SOA and microservices orientation; multitenancy; DevOps-friendly tool chains that automate everything other than actual coding, and so forth (“and so forth” being ManagementSpeak for “I’m pretty sure there’s more to know, but I don’t know it myself”).

But migrating to cloud-native architectures that are easily shifted to public or hybrid clouds is quite different from migrating applications designed for data-center deployment. And it’s the latter that are the ones that are supposed to save all the money.

Sure, applications coded from non-SOA, non-microservices, non-multi-tenant designs can probably be recompiled in an IaaS environment. But once they’ve been recompiled they’ll probably need significant investments in performance engineering to get them to a point where they aren’t unacceptably sluggish.

Oh, one more thing: Moving an application to the cloud means stretching whatever technologies are used for application and data integration through the firewall and public network that now separates public-cloud-hosted applications to those that have yet to be migrated.

Based on my admittedly high-level-only understanding, not even all enterprise service buses can achieve high levels of performance when, instead of moving transactions around at wire or backplane speeds, they’re now limited to public networking bandwidths and latencies.

Complicating integration performance even more is the need to integrate applications hosted in multiple, geographically disbursed data centers, as would be the case when, for example, a company migrates to, say, Salesforce for CRM, internal development to Azure, and financials and other ERP applications to Oracle Cloud.

For many IT organizations, integration is enterprise architecture’s orphan stepchild. Lots of companies have yet to replace their bespoke interface tangle with any engineered interface architecture.

So lifting and shifting isn’t as simple as lifting and then shifting, any more than moving a house is as simple as jacking it up, putting it on a truck, and hauling it to the new address. Although integration might not be as fraught as the house now lying at the bottom of Lake Superior.

Which isn’t to say there’s no legitimate reason to migrate to the cloud. (Non-double-negative version: There are circumstances for which migrating applications to the cloud makes a great deal of sense.) Here are three circumstances I’m personally confident of, and I’d be delighted to hear of more:

> Startups and small entrepreneurships that lack the negotiating power to drive deep technology discounts, and that will benefit from needing a much smaller full-time and permanent IT workforce.

> Applications that have wide swings in workload, whether because of seasonal peaks, event-driven spikes, or other drivers, the result is a need to rapidly add and shed capacity.

> A Mobile workforce or user base that needs access to the application in question from a large number of uncontrolled locations.

At least, this was the situation the last time I took a serious look at it.

But this isn’t a column about the cloud. It’s about the same subject as last week’s KJR: How to avoid making decisions based on belief, prejudice, and denial. The opening anecdote shows how easy it is to succumb to confirmation bias: If you want to believe, even vendor press releases count as evidence.

In that vein, here’s a question to ponder: Why is it that, after centuries of success for the scientific method, most people most of the time (including many scientists) operate so often from positions of high certainty and low evidence?

The answer is, I think, that uncertainty causes anxiety. And people don’t like feeling anxious.

But collecting and evaluating evidence is hard and often tedious work — not a particularly popular formula.

Isaac Asimov once started a Q&A session by saying, “I can answer any question, so long as you’ll accept ‘I don’t know’ as an answer.”

If Dr. Asimov was comfortable not knowing stuff, the rest of us should be at least as comfortable.

I think.

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|In: Cognitive Enterprise|Last Updated:

The problem with quadrant charts isn’t that they have two axes and four boxes. It’s the magic part — why their contents are what they are.

Well, okay, that’s one of the problems. Another is that once you (you being me, that is) get in the quadrant habit, new ones pop into your head all the time.

Like, for example, this little puppy that came to me while I was watching Kong: Skull Island as my Gogo inflight movie.

It’s a new, Gartnerized test of actorhood. Preposterousness is the vertical axis. Convincing portrayal of a character is the horizontal. In Kong, Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Hiddleston, and John C. Reilly made the upper right. I leave it to KJR’s readers to label the quadrants.

While this might not be the best example, quadrant charts can be useful for visualizing how a bunch of stuff compares. Take, for example, my new Opinionization Quadrant. It visualizes the different types of thinking you and I run across all the time … and, if we’re honest with each other, the ones we ourselves engage in as well.

It’s all about evidence and certainty. No matter the subject, more and better evidence is what defines expertise and should be the source of confident opinion.

Less and worse evidence should lead to skepticism, along with a desire to obtain more and better evidence unless apathy prevails.

When more and better evidence doesn’t overcome skepticism, that’s just as bad as prejudice and as unfounded as belief. It’s where denial happens — in the face of overwhelming evidence someone is unwilling to change their position on a subject.

Rationality happens when knowledge and certainty positively correlate. Except there’s so much known about so many subjects that, with the possible exception of Professor Irwin Corey (the world’s foremost authority), we should all be completely skeptical about just about everything.

So we need to allow for once-removed evidence — reporting about those subjects we lack the time or, in some cases genius to become experts in ourselves.

No question, once-removed evidence — journalism, to give it a name — does have a few pitfalls.

The first happens when we … okay, I start my quest for an opinion in the Belief/Prejudice quadrant. My self-knowledge extends to knowing I’m too ignorant about the subject to have a strongly held opinion, but not to acknowledging to myself that my strongly held opinion might be wrong.

And so off I go, energetically Googling for ammunition rather than illumination. This being the age of the Internet and all, someone will have written exactly what I want to read, convincingly enough to stay within the boundaries set by my confirmation bias.

This isn’t, of course, actual journalism but it can look a lot like it to the unwary.

The second need for care is understanding the nature and limits of reportage.

Start here: Journalism is a profession. Journalists have to learn their trade. And like most professions it’s an affinity group. Members in good standing care about the respect and approval of other members in good standing.

So when it comes to reporting on, say, social or political matters, a professional reporter might have liberal or conservative inclinations, but are less likely to root their reporting in their political affinity than you or I would be.

Their affinity, when reporting, is to their profession, not to where they sit on the political spectrum. Given a choice between supporting politicians they agree with and publishing an exclusive story damaging to those same politicians, they’ll go with the scoop every time.

IT journalism isn’t all that different, except that instead of being accused of liberal or conservative bias, IT writers are accused of being Apple, or Microsoft, (or Oracle, or open source) fanbodies.

Also: As with political writing, there’s a difference between professional reporters and opinionators. In both politics and tech, opinionators are much more likely to be aligned to one camp or another than reporters. Me too, although I try to keep a grip on it.

And in tech publishing the line separating reporting and opinion isn’t as bright and clear as with political reporting. It can’t be. With tech, true expertise often requires deep knowledge of a specific product line, so affinity bias is hard to avoid. Also, many of us who write in the tech field aren’t degreed journalists. We’re pretty good writers who know the territory, so our journalistic affinity is more limited.

There’s also tech pseudojournalism, where those who are reporting and opinionating (and, for that matter, quadrant-izing) work for firms that receive significant sums from those being reported on.

As Groucho said so long ago, “Love goes out the door when money comes innuendo.”

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