Cloud First, Sanity Last

Ralph Webster
July 18, 2025

Hello again, architects of order (or at least attempted order).

This week’s tale comes from the swirling cumulonimbus of modern enterprise strategy — the “Cloud First” initiative. Also known as: How to Start a War Between Finance, Security, and Anyone Who Understands Legacy Systems.

The Migration Mayhem

Meet Zoe, an enterprise architect tasked with overseeing her company's Great Cloud Migration™.

The directive was simple: “Everything in the cloud by Q4. No exceptions.”

The reality?

The mainframe thinks “cloud” is a weather report.
Procurement keeps asking if AWS comes with a loyalty card.
The CISO’s blood pressure has its own Gantt chart.

At one point, someone tried to lift-and-shift a 25-year-old monolith without a plan. The cloud responded by charging $43,000 in egress fees... per week.

Every status meeting began with “We just want agility” and ended in an existential debate about latency and legacy licensing agreements.

TOGAF to the Rescue (With an Umbrella)

TOGAF doesn’t promise blue skies, but it does provide a decent umbrella.

Zoe revisited the Architecture Development Method (ADM) and calmly introduced a few forbidden concepts into the conversation:

Phase A: Architecture Vision — What are we actually trying to achieve besides ticking a buzzword?
Phase B–D: Business, Information Systems, and Technology Architectures — Mapping current-to-target states (and explaining to stakeholders why FTP on port 21 doesn't count as “cloud-native”).
Architecture Governance — Aka, “No, you can't spin up a Kubernetes cluster on your intern’s laptop.”

TOGAF helped her reframe the initiative as a transformation, not a teleportation.

Educational Twist: Surviving Cloud Madness

Define the Architecture Vision with business outcomes, not just tech slogans.
Don’t skip the Baseline Architecture. You’d be surprised what’s still running on that forgotten HP-UX server.
Invest in Change Management. The cloud doesn't break systems — people do (through panic reconfiguration).
Watch those costs. Cloud-native ≠ Cloud-cheap.

Humor in Diagrams

Have you been through a cloud migration where only morale was truly lifted?
Tell us your horror (or hero) story. We’ll anonymize it — mostly.

Next Week’s Tease

“Agile-ish: When your ‘Scrum Master’ is just your loudest developer.”

Stay sane. Or at least documented.