For the modern ITOps leader, no day is complete without a barrage of information from every angle about what you should be doing with your environment. “This buzzword will give you this feature”, or “This subscription will fix everything”. The noise is omnipresent and doesn’t care about your actual workload. It’s on your phone, advertised on your favourite podcast (at a higher volume than the actual podcast), or staring at you from a billboard.

But what if you simply didn’t pay attention to it? What if instead of keeping up with the latest and greatest, you stayed the course for a year or two? Keep your applications running on the same infrastructure and stick to keeping everything up. This sounds like a solid plan, with minimal disruption to the status quo, and definitely features fewer budget conversations and admin. It certainly has the potential to get you across the finish line. But at what cost?

The great ‘what if?’

“Opportunity cost” is nothing new. If you make one choice, what are you giving up by not going with the other choice? It’s the great “what if?” of every big decision, and unfortunately in many cases it only really occurs in hindsight.

In ITOps, these decisions happen so frequently that the process can desensitise you to use this mechanism to the full extent. Think about some of your software subscription renewals over the years – was it a process of looking at every alternative out there every year to see if they were a better fit, or did a couple of the renewals happen because the admin and pressure didn’t match up with the time you had available? Let’s do an exercise, based loosely on real-life situations.

If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it

For the sake of example, let’s say you have hybrid cloud IT and application environments, a mix physical and virtual hardware, with some workloads running in the cloud. You decide to keep your IT and application infrastructure the same because it does what it is supposed to do, is fairly modern and you’ve been handling it successfully. You’re aware there is going to be growth because if there isn’t, something is wrong at a business level. You know what to expect in terms of maintenance and you have some frame of reference on the problems that you can expect. You’ll scale everything up if and when you need to.

Somewhere down the line, business growth is phenomenal. Your customers nearly double, and so does the consumption of your digital services. This is fantastic for the business – but why is your team burning the midnight oil? Suddenly the cost of growth is starting to hurt, because scaling up the physical hardware requires money and time, and the cloud bill is starting to grow tentacles.

The support team is struggling to keep the cracks from spreading, and the more resources you throw at it, the more complicated it gets. At the same time, you get asked by business to do more with less, because this is, after all, a business and your budget has been finalised. In the end, you get there, battle-hardened, tired and maybe over budget – but you’re there. You reached your targets and have the scars to show for it. At least soon, with the new cycle, you should feel some sort of short reprieve. Instead, it starts all over again.

Somewhere in a parallel universe

Starting with the same environment, you’re aware of what you have, and there is growth on the horizon. There are going to be growth costs to keep your digital services ticking like they should.

Instead of increasing your physical hardware, you optimise to run essential workloads and they don’t sprawl out hand in hand with the customer growth rate. More of your virtual hardware and compute workloads are offloaded to the cloud, into environments expertly engineered for their purpose. To make sure everything scales dynamically without breaking the bank, you restructure and containerise mission-critical services and orchestrate them with Amazon EKS or Red Hat OpenShift. And then you automate.

Some of the older functionality sits on that one machine which everyone is terrified to switch off, but it gets containerised and modernised with event streaming, like Apache Kafka or Confluent, and everything is watched over by AI-driven Observability built with Elastic and AWS Bedrock.

Business is booming. The next budget cycle comes around, along with someone from business asking you to get more done with less. You look at cloud cost optimisation to squeeze out every drop of performance while piledriving your cost efficiency targets. Your team is working with your partners who support and maintain the platform you’ve built together and are spending more time innovating instead of running for the firehose. You reach the finish line, and you’ve got so many plans for what’s next.

Both of these hypotheticals have the exact same finish line, with vastly different states of future-readiness, anxiety, and wear and tear on the team. The budgets might also not look that different, with optimising overheads still a major discussion in many boardrooms, and subscriptions versus perpetual licences suddenly making many of these tools viable options.

So, what is the opportunity cost of staying the course?