Migrating to the cloud, in whole or in part, can be tempting for organizations of all sizes. The cloud offers agility, potential cost savings, and scalability — all without a commitment to physical devices. But what about the risk? Migrating to the cloud can be a complicated undertaking with the potential for missteps and hidden expenses. You’ll need to take a careful look at why you want to migrate to the cloud, as well as do the work researching cloud vendors and migration approaches.

Welcome to Day 1 of the software development life cycle — what now? We’ve already covered Day 0 server provisioning, and you should be ready to start writing code that will support your DevOps initiatives and make your life easier …or are you? Put some of our wisdom and experience at work for Day 1 of the software life cycle, and make sure you’re fully prepared to handle common pitfalls and problems that can become ongoing issues for Day 2.

Bad news: Configuration drift is going to happen no matter what you do. It’s very easy to miss, caused by some innocuous mistake or patch and buried in paper trails that don’t exist. By the time you’ve found which configurations have drifted, it usually means something’s already going wrong. But here’s the good news: You and your precious configurations don’t have to take it lying down.