Modernization is about competitiveness, not buzzwords. By treating clouds as interchangeable parts, automating non-functional work, and adopting security and observability by default, companies can achieve day-one velocity with day-two reliability — all at a cost that scales with usage.
Modernization keeps you competitive. Learn how velocity with guardrails, cloud-native maturity, and cost-aware platforms drive speed, reliability, and ROI.
Modernization is not a tech facelift. It's how you stay competitive. The job is simple to say and hard to do: deliver securely, reliably, and cost-effectively, and move fast. That's what your customers notice and what your P&L shows.
You care about your product, so you have to care how it's produced. You don't need every infrastructure detail, but you should expect an operation that is streamlined, secure, and cost aware. Process inefficiency shows up in your velocity and, eventually, your market share.
Last week I talked to Control Plane CEO Doron Grinstein about this exact topic. Here are some of the things we talked about.
The outcome executives actually buy: velocity with guardrails
Executives care about velocity. They've got a pretty clear goal: idea in the morning, customer-visible endpoint by afternoon. That means that no matter how fast you go, stability, security, and compliance can't be afterthoughts. Perhaps the most practical way to achieve all of this at the same time is to avoid tying the business to a single provider or deployment pattern. In other words, you treat the major clouds as interchangeable parts. That preserves options for M&A, customer hosting preferences, regional rules, and cost arbitrage while you keep shipping.
Just remember that there is no “done.” If you stop improving, you fall behind. Continuous improvement has to be part of your operating model, not a special project.
The hidden tax you are likely paying
Most organizations are underwater on non-functional work. Your teams wrestle with logging, metrics, tracing, secrets, service discovery, audit trails, mutual TLS, subnets, routing tables, registries, image scanning, autoscaling, storage classes, and so many more things you simply can't ignore in a production environment. That means stitching all of these things together is slow, brittle, and expensive. Many teams spend years chasing “cloud-native maturity” and still top out at mediocre availability and creeping costs.
Meanwhile, the business keeps asking for faster delivery. The result is that you feel like your only option is to make a difficult choice: either slow down to make the platform reliable, or ship fast on shaky ground. Fortunately, there's a third option.
What good looks like on day one
Cloud-native maturity feels like it has to take years, especially when the bar is day-one velocity with day-two reliability. To do that, Doron talks about several components.
- Standard building blocks. Containers and Kubernetes as the default “compute substrate,” so teams ship the same way everywhere.
- Right-sized spend. Workloads request only the CPU and memory they need and scale to zero when idle.
- Built-in observability. Logs, metrics, traces, and alerts are there by default. No scavenger hunt for dashboards.
- Security by default. Mutual TLS between services, strong secrets management, and audit trails turned on.
- Global reach, local latency. Traffic routes to the nearest healthy location. If a region fails, users are served elsewhere without drama.
- Everything as code. The platform, workloads, and policies are declarative and versioned. CI/CD handles promotion, rollback, and drift.
This is how you get to the real goal: ship quickly while the platform keeps the lights on.
You can achieve all this on your own, but you also have the option to use a service like Control Plane (check out the webinar for a demo of how that works).
ROI in one line: pay for the glass of milk
Doron pointed out that trying to do this on your own is like paying for a herd of cows, farmhands, pastures and so on, when all you really need is a glass of milk. Instead, by using a service like Control Plane, you get fractional, right-sized compute that charges you for what the workload actually consumes, not for idle capacity and the surrounding infrastructure. When platform services like load balancing, logging, metrics, and certificates are integrated, you avoid a pile of per-service fees and the staffing cost to glue them together. The savings aren't just line items; they're reclaimed engineering time you can reallocate to features and revenue.
So let's look at how you get there.
How to evaluate your current state in one meeting
Before you can figure out how to get to cloud native maturity, you need to figure out where you are now. As yourself these questions:
- Lead time: How long does it take to get from approved idea to production endpoint? Days, weeks, months?
- Toil: What percentage of platform engineering time goes to just keeping the lights on versus enabling product teams?
- Availability: What was last year’s actual availability, and how much downtime is tied to platform glue? How much did that downtime cost you?
- Cost drivers: Which 3 non-compute items cost the most each month, and do you get proportional value?
- Exit plan: If you had to move off your current provider or region in 90 days, what would break?
These answers will tell you right away how much "modernization debt" you're in.
A Practical Path to Get Started
OK, so now that you know where you are, how do you get where you want to be? Modernization can look overwhelming if you treat it like a giant, once-and-done project. The smarter move is to start small, get some quick wins, and build momentum. Here’s how to do it without boiling the ocean:
- Start with one product line. Don’t try to refactor your whole company at once. Pick one product or service that matters, but won’t paralyze the business if you stumble. Move it onto the “standard path”: containerized workloads, autoscaling baked in, observability turned on from day one, and security defaults like TLS and secrets management already in place. The goal is to prove the model, not win a purity contest.
- Codify success into templates. Once the first team is running on the new stack, don’t leave their work as tribal knowledge. Capture it as reusable infrastructure templates, CI/CD pipelines, and policy-as-code. That way the second and third teams can adopt it without starting from scratch. Standardization is where the compounding benefits of modernization show up. You move faster precisely because you aren’t reinventing the wheel.
- Set guardrails that matter. Most companies measure too many things and act on none of them. You only need three metrics to stay honest:
- Lead time to production (how fast ideas go live).
- Availability target (how much downtime customers actually feel).
- Maximum unit cost per request or job (to make sure growth doesn’t bankrupt you).
These are easy for executives to understand and keep everyone—from engineering to finance—pulling in the same direction.
- Measure weekly, not annually. Annual reviews are too slow. By the time you learn you’re off track, you’ve wasted a year. Look at lead time, toil, and cost every week. Adjust fast. If you don’t see measurable improvements inside a quarter, change the plan instead of doubling down.
This incremental approach does two important things. First, it reduces the risk of modernization fatigue. (Nobody wants another “five-year transformation roadmap” that never delivers.) Second, it builds credibility. When executives and teams see visible gains in speed, reliability, and cost within 90 days, they’re much more likely to support scaling the effort across the organization.
The close
Modernization is about competitiveness. The real win is day-one velocity with day-two reliability, at a cost profile that scales with actual usage. Treat clouds as interchangeable parts, push non-functional work into the platform, and pay for the glass of milk. That is how you move faster without raising your risk.
