Strategy, Migration & Complexity
Multi-cloud and hybrid taught cautiously and with their real cost, migration as inventory → dependency mapping → strategy → pilot → gradual move → validation, the five migration dispositions, and a qualitative operational-complexity score that makes "we added Kubernetes and a service mesh" visible as a decision.
Running on two providers does not make a system more reliable by itself. It duplicates networking, identity, observability and expertise, and it is only justified by a business requirement you can name in one sentence.
Q · What concrete business requirement would justify running this system on more than one cloud provider?
On-premises and cloud connected by private links, run as one system. A legitimate and common architecture — for legacy systems, compliance, data locality and gradual migration — with a network seam that becomes the most important thing you operate.
Q · When should some of the system stay on-premises, and what does connecting the two halves actually commit us to?
Inventory, dependency mapping, strategy, pilot, gradual move, validation. Migrations do not fail at the cutover — they fail at the inventory, on the undocumented cron job running on the server nobody owns.
Q · How do we move an existing production system to the cloud without discovering its real dependencies during the cutover?
Rehost, replatform, refactor, retain, retire — five decisions about what to do with a component, each with a different effort, risk and payoff. Retire is frequently the one with the highest return, and nobody puts it on the plan.
Q · For this specific component, is the right move to lift it, adjust it, rewrite it, leave it, or delete it?
A deliberately crude, simulated score that makes "we added Kubernetes, a mesh and multi-region" visible as a decision with an ongoing price — measured in on-call surface, upgrade cadence, required expertise and how hard debugging becomes.
Q · How much operational complexity has this architecture actually committed the team to, and which parts of it does the workload require?