Over the past 2 years, I have been working with several South African financial services institutions including top banks on their cloud migration journey. To have a successful cloud journey, DevOps and automation play a key role, however many interesting challenges arise when you take a heavily regulated industry to cloud. In this talk I will share some of these challenges, horror stories and key lessons that I have learnt throughout this process including (but not limited to):

• Shifting from an on-prem to a cloud mindset

• Creating and sharing golden images (AMIs)

• The container security dilemma

• Testing for failure

• Change Management & ITIL

• Separating infrastructure and OS automation

• Data protection & encryption

• Automated governance & security

• Tips for effective communication to key stakeholders and end users

In this talk I will use AWS terminology to illustrate my point, however most of the lessons and key points are applicable to other cloud providers as well. The content of this talk will be structured in a way that it is both interesting and accessible to a large audience.