This week we continue to take a look at public things for a public cloud.

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This issue is part 5 of a 5 part series

As of this issue, we now have historical perspectives and definitions for status dashboards, Engineering SLO, DevCommsOps, and Mean Time to RCA. Next, let’s talk about the increasing importance of dependency mapping across hyperscale public cloud service providers and consider business value engineering and customer journeys.

Over the past four weeks, we covered Who, What, Where, and When for cloud companies that “write it down” to pursue goals for The Perfect Team. This issue will get to the final remaining question: Why.

To get an understanding of Impact Mapping, you could start with a book of the same title. For now, assume Impact Mapping answers the question, Why.

The answer? “Because that’s what the business needs.”

Impact Mapping can be challenging because the public cloud is increasingly less about public access than private considerations for the public of specific places. Effectively, this means that Impact Mapping should consider the technology stack and the operating geography for the laws or regulatory landscape that may also evolve.

Thinking back to our first issue and the inspiration for this series, Impact Mapping is meant to combine the “Service architecture documentation” and “Documented service dependency maps” from the blog post from @cloudpundit.

The “Service architecture documentation”

The “Documented service dependency maps”

When looking for evidence of Impact Mapping in hyperscale public cloud service providers, we can survey public information. Once again, the list is in no particular order or weighting other than shorter names to longer names.

IBM Cloud Impact Mapping examples:

Alibaba Cloud Impact Mapping examples:

Microsoft Impact Mapping examples:

Amazon Web Services Impact Mapping examples:

Google Cloud Platform Impact Mapping examples:

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Impact Mapping examples:

Notes:

In summary, there are incredibly stark variations amongst the hyperscalers in expressing Impact Mapping. Further, it is reasonable to expect the market will drive demand for standards that normalize the variations or promote wider adoption of approaches such as the C4 model.

Cloud in Public findings on Status Dashboards, Engineering SLO, DevCommsOps, Mean Time to RCA, and Impact Mapping will not be static. As such, we want to understand what the Who, What, Where, When, and Why means in terms of business value engineering.

So, let’s get a quick overview of business value engineering and think about the customer journey.

Each hyperscale public cloud service provider will have to anticipate customers at various stages of a journey from status quo to one cloud or the eventuality of mutlicloud. So, having a business value engineering framework in place will ensure the following:

To state this another way, let’s loosely paraphrase Dean of Big Data Bill Schmarzo on the essential nature of step 4 and the WHILE.

Help might come from so-called cloud pricing calculators like AWS Pricing Calculator, Azure Pricing Calculator, Google Cloud Pricing Calculator, Oracle Cloud Cost Estimator, IBM Cloud Cost Estimator, or Alibaba Cloud Price Calculator. However, in each example, there is no solid connection to Impact Mapping that permits building the business case with accurate modeling well in advance of OPEX decisions in any quantified manner.

Eventually, each hyperscale cloud service provider inputs from real-time pricing API or their calculators and estimators will become a consideration for business value engineering tools. So, keep an eye on tools companies for Impact Mapping updates for business value engineering (by alphabetical order) such as DecisionLink ValueCloud, Mainstay Advisor Value Platform, MediaFly Value Story Alinean, and VisualizeROI.

Ultimately, partnering with customers in business performance improvement terms is the only way hyperscale public cloud service providers will have an enduring competitive advantage. As such, each hyperscale public cloud service provider will need to make strategic investments that help the customer uncover the highest value opportunities to leverage the proper well-architected framework that is underpinned with the right technology – and at the right time.

If you read this far, when you think about a multicloud journey, keep Faction in mind as a strategic partner for maximizing access to hyperscale public cloud service provider innovations.

We’re hiring at Faction!🎉🤓☁️🚀

To see our current openings click here. ⬅️🤓☁️🚀

See a fit for you or someone in your network? ✅🤓☁️🚀

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