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What cloud infrastructure surprises have you encountered during migration?
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As a cloud security specialist, I've seen my fair share of cloud infrastructure surprises during migrations. Everyone plans for the technical challenges, but the real surprises often come from unexpected places.
The cloud automation surprises are particularly interesting - automation that works perfectly on-premise sometimes behaves completely differently in the cloud. Also, the cloud computing flexibility can actually create new security challenges if not managed properly.
I'm curious about what cloud infrastructure surprises others have encountered. Things like unexpected costs, performance differences, or management challenges that nobody warned you about.
What has surprised you most about moving to cloud infrastructure?
One of the biggest cloud infrastructure surprises for me was the network performance variability. In our on-premise data center, we had consistent, predictable network performance. In the cloud, it can vary based on so many factors - region, time of day, even which availability zone you're in.
We had to completely rethink our application architecture to handle this variability. The cloud computing flexibility helped, but it was definitely a surprise we hadn't anticipated during migration planning.
Cost management has been full of surprises. Everyone warns you about cloud costs, but the actual patterns are often unexpected. Things like data transfer costs between regions, or the cost of certain managed services compared to self-managed alternatives.
The cloud computing efficiency gains we expected in some areas were offset by unexpected costs in others. We've had to become much more sophisticated about monitoring and optimizing our cloud spending.
The skill shift required was a surprise. We thought moving to cloud would be mostly about learning new tools. But it's actually required completely new ways of thinking about infrastructure and applications.
The cloud computing software development mindset is different. You have to think about things like eventual consistency, stateless applications, and failure domains in ways that weren't necessary with traditional infrastructure.
For remote teams, the dependency on internet connectivity was a surprise we hadn't fully considered. When everything is in the cloud, a team member with poor internet becomes completely blocked. We've had to help team members improve their home internet setups and provide backup connectivity options.
The cloud computing remote work model assumes good, reliable internet, which isn't always the reality for distributed team members in different parts of the world.
The pace of change has been surprising. Cloud providers release new services and features constantly. Keeping up with what's available and understanding when to adopt new services versus sticking with established ones has become a significant part of our technology strategy.
The cloud computing innovation cycle is so fast that it can be challenging to maintain stability while also taking advantage of new capabilities.
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