Agile and The Cloud

We are living in a golden age of the I.T. business. The landscape is being transformed at a pace like never before. We are producing solutions and creating new industries virtually overnight. Speed and agility are the maxims of the day.

Why now? How did we get here? Much of the credit has to be given to agile practices. That is, the formal practices that deliver small changes more often. We are experimenting and learning how to adapt quickly with Agile practices. When was the last time you updated your web browser? I can’t remember either, yet it is updated all the time.

However, agility is the means to the end, not the final product. How, then, can we manifest our agility? What can hold these experiments at the same pace as we create them? The cloud can.

If Agile is the theory, then Cloud is the practice.

One of the principles of the Agile Manifesto is, “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”

Scrum teams commonly deliver working software every two weeks. But ‘deliver’ is often a hand-off to another team which then puts it into production, or performance testing. This means the development team is no longer in control of its work. Handoffs are time-consuming and costly. Wouldn’t it be better, then, if the development team could manage its work end-to-end?

What can give agency to a team and enable them to self-organize around their work? How can they remove the delay of ‘tossing it over the fence’? Creating our own internal software solution that automates was always expensive and time consuming, so naturally we avoided it. Now, however, Cloud providers such as Amazon et al have taken the risk and capital investment for us. They have solutions that put the control into the team’s hands. The team can now automate their deployments and stay in control of their work.

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