Without cloud infrastructure, many digital customer experiences as we know them would not exist. Cloud computing provides scalability, data recovery and security, and organizations around the world have realized significant financial benefits from migrating their IT infrastructure. Yet despite this, the cloud is not about technology, it’s about management.
From its beginnings at Amazon, to the role AWS plays today, Jamie Dobson (pictured below), founder of Container Solutions and author of the newly released book, The Cloud Native Attitude, tells CX Network why the cloud is essential to business continuity and modern retail, and what CX leaders need to understand about cloud migration.
CX Network: Many have heard of the term 'cloud native', particularly in the context of containers, orchestration and microservices. But what does it mean in the context of customer experience and service?
Amazon.com started life not as ‘the everything store’ but instead sold the simplest of commodities, books. They were so successful that soon their computers had to serve thousands and then millions of customers simultaneously. The vast numbers of computers were so expensive that software developers were not allowed to deploy their software to them.
In practice this meant that new features did not make it into the hands of actual customers quickly enough; and it gave Jeff Bezos a CX headache. Bezos knew a fantastic customer experience would create not just customer loyalty but intergenerational customer loyalty.
Amazon back then was claiming land and customers on the digital frontier in the same way that Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck, just 100 years earlier with their catalogue, had once conquered the actual frontier. But the dire state of Amazon’s IT infrastructure was getting in the way of that.
The solution, learning from those who were obsessed with customer experience, was an idea so radical it changed the world.
Bezos said that Amazon’s software developers would be the customers of the IT infrastructure team. That meant that the IT team would provide a ‘customer experience’ – what became known as ‘developer experience’ – to their software developers that made it as easy to deploy new software to the web-store as it was for their customers to order books online.
That one change, to make sure the developers had a great experience, meant Amazon’s actual customers would have a fantastic experience through new and exciting features. One such feature was an enhanced recommendation engine which, decades before artificial intelligence (AI) joined the party, combined with just a sliver of personal information to create a highly customized shopping experience. Later, Amazon Prime helped to get around the bugaboo of mail order shopping, the hassle and opaqueness of postage and packaging costs.
The cloud creates a fluid and easy way to continuously evolve web-stores which in turn leads to outstanding customer experiences. As the research of CX Network and Amazon Prime’s customers attest to, most consumers are happy to pay for a better customer experience.
CX Network: Your new book The Cloud Native Attitude, provides a beginner’s guide to cloud native with a focus on what it means to retail businesses. Why is cloud migration becoming more relevant in retail enterprises?
Jamie Dobson: When it was a tool for internal use at Amazon, the cloud was used to do what Amazon called their ‘undifferentiated heavy lifting’. But it soon dawned on Amazon that their cloud was not just a way for them to optimize their own low-margin retail business whilst providing outstanding CX, it was a way to optimize all the world’s retail businesses whilst helping them to provide an outstanding customer experience.
If Amazon could do other businesses’ undifferentiated heavy lifting for them, then those businesses would be free to create a unique digital experience for their customers.
Unsurprisingly, retailers who got this right, like Adidas, use Amazon’s cloud, AWS, to create outstanding digital customer experiences. This is not just about shopping online but augmented reality, for example, interaction at sporting events, and, in the ‘back office’, advanced analytics and supply chain management – the exact sort of ‘undifferentiated heavy lifting’ that AWS was designed to do.
In short, the cloud nowadays drives engaging customer experiences through advanced analytics which drive a powerful user experience and constantly and consistently drives down the costs of doing business for companies like Adidas, Sainsbury’s and Zalando.
CX Network: When we conducted our research into the Global State of CX for 2025, as many as 37 percent of our respondents said their organization has seen a positive impact on profit as a result of their cloud migration. How are these financial benefits achieved?
Jamie Dobson: Businesses are always seeking to do more work with less people. Technology is one way to do that. However, the cloud is a slightly different beast because it is not a technology that companies buy, but a technology that they pay for via a monthly subscription. The only way to keep that subscription cost as low as possible is through the use of software automation.
To understand this, let’s talk about most retailers’ worst nightmare: a computer outage on Black Friday. In the olden days, retailers had to have enough computers to handle Black Friday loads. Let’s say that the number of computers they needed on Black Friday was 1,000. That meant for most of the year most of those computers sat idle. What a waste of money and what a hit to profits.
With this cloud, this is not how Black Friday loads are dealt with. Retailers who use the cloud use software and scripts to scale the number of computers up and down depending on the actual load. When customers are in bed, for example, the cloud computers a retailer uses are ‘scaled down’. When a commercial airs on television and customers jump on their phones to take advantage of a special offer, the computers are ‘scaled up’. All of that is done automatically which means the supply of cloud computers is sized to demand. An economic problem thought impossible to solve, the mapping of demand exactly to supply, is solved by the cloud.
The positive impact on profit that your respondents reported comes from both the right-sizing of costs and the labor savings costs of software and automation, on the one hand, and the profits that great customer experience drives on the other.
CX Network: Our research also found that organizations are investing to safeguard business continuity, with this emerging as a top investment area for 2025. How does a cloud migration support business continuity?
Jamie Dobson: The cloud, in Amazon’s case, gives its users access to the IT infrastructure of the world’s leading ecommerce store. It was designed to never fail because if a web-company’s computers fail then then their business starts to fail, too. The cloud was, in other words, designed with business continuity as its highest design priority.
Most companies cannot replicate the set up that Amazon has. If they instead use AWS, or another cloud, in terms of business continuity, this is what they can get out the box:
Redundancy: Because the cloud’s data centres are in multiple regions with failsafe mechanisms built in.
Disaster recovery: Because the cloud providers automate backups, real-time replication and this, for practical purposes, means quick recovery from power outages and cyber attacks.
Scalability: As I mentioned in regards to Black Friday, because scaling up and down is automated and so business continues no matter how demanding customers get.
Self-healing: Because tools like Kubernetes restart software when it stops working and can be upgraded without customers noticing
CX Network: CX professionals may not always lead a cloud migration in their organization, but they do need to be able to understand the benefits and drawbacks. What do you believe are three things CX leaders need to understand about cloud migration?
Jamie Dobson: The first thing is that cloud computing is difficult. Cloud computing is a form of what computer scientists call ‘distributed computing’, which is one of the hardest forms even for the best software developers to get their heads around. Those selling cloud services are likely to play this down!
It is logical that those who sell cloud services will have reductive, vivid and colorful messages to make out or, you could say mislead, potential customers into thinking a cloud migration is easy.
However, as the founder of one of the most effective cloud consultancies in the world, I tell my customers, underestimate this challenge at your own peril. The ones who listen to me succeed.
The second thing is that cloud migration is not about technology. It is about management. Cloud computing is premised on a simple idea: we learn about our customer’s experience through experiments. We, in other words, try things, see what works and what doesn’t, and try again. This was the rationale of Amazon’s cloud – it was simultaneously a sandpit, where teams developed their ideas experimentally, and the IT infrastructure of the world’s most successful ecommerce company.
Successful cloud teams care so much about learning experimentally, or in other words learning from failures, that if failures do not occur naturally, they simulate them. Netflix has a computer program called Chaos Monkey. The program ‘runs around’ breaking things in order to test Netflix’s self-healing systems.
This is how seriously Netflix takes learning from failure and it is one way they achieve business continuity.
Now, just a whisper of the word “failure” in most companies it’s met with sheer terror. But failure is a normal part of software and infrastructure development with the cloud and therefore failure must be normalized. The creation of a failsafe, risk-seeking and relaxed environment is the job of management.
The managers and leaders who succeed in creating such an environment are able to foster communication, minimize the effects of the hierarchy, keep bureaucracy at bay and resolve differences whilst snuffing out any simmering resentments or conflict. These leaders are usually emotionally strong, do not suffer from narcissism and are able to get strong willed software developers to set their egos aside.
In my research for all three of my books, leadership is the one correlated trait of successful cloud migration. No leadership, no success with the cloud. Fact.
The final thing to understand is that cloud native architectures and cloud migration are both well understood, as you can see in the two books I wrote on the topic, The Cloud Native Attitude and Cloud Native Transformation. These are both great and cheap resources. However, there is a hyper-active community that is full of wonderful people providing talks and blogs for nothing more than the love of cloud computing. There are, of course, great companies too who will help. At Container Solutions, our raison d'etre is to help companies and the people in them.
My final words on the matter are that the cloud helps with customer experience, cost savings and business continuity. Success is hard to achieve but it is worth going for and, out there, in the community, are people more than willing to lend a hand with what is essentially a mature technology and way of building software. But, the moment you underestimate how hard cloud computing is, is the moment you feel pain.
Underestimate it at your own peril!
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