Forward-thinking organisations are increasingly focusing on simplification, with the most resilient enterprises learning to combine multiple strategies
Over the last few years, companies have been racing to migrate workloads to the cloud, fascinated by promises of agility, cost savings and seamless scalability. While these benefits remain attainable, the experience of many organisations in 2025 is more nuanced.
In fact, they are finding that cloud adoption can be more complex and expensive than anticipated without the right DevOps resources.
The hidden costs of cloud
The cloud offers powerful capabilities and delivers incredible potential. However, it is easy for businesses to run into DevOps-related hurdles along the way, with many companies finding it difficult to fully realise the benefits of the technology. More precisely, several IT leaders report rising challenges around hidden costs and operational overhead.
For example, teams often discover they are spending more than planned due to underutilised resources or sub-optimal configurations due to complex setups, mainly associated with Kubernetes (K8s). In effect, the standard for container orchestration is a powerful tool but brings its own set of learning curves. Managing clusters, updates and security configurations can consume significant time and resources while presenting high risk of misconfigurations. These factors can stretch engineering specialists thin, especially in smaller teams or those with limited DevOps capacity, as they can divert attention away from business innovation.
The same is true for multi-cloud, which offers incredible resilience and flexibility, with organisations given the ability to leverage the top features of different providers. However, IT leaders often face though trade-offs, as juggling multiple providers can feel overwhelming, especially when teams are committed to follow the best practice of building different variants of services that are optimised for each specific provider. While a strategy based on autonomy typically offers more value than abstracting away all differences, as it helps embracing the strengths of each cloud, it involves considerable investments. As such, many development teams with limited resources are required to do the opposite, limiting their architecture to the “lowest common denominator” of cloud features.
Application diversity compounds these challenges. As organisations continue to digitalise, software specialists have to manage a wider range of applications at varying maturity levels, built with different frameworks and technologies. For instance, in the enterprise Java space, companies often run simultaneously monoliths and microservices using a mix of Java EE, Jakarta EE, Spring and/or Quarkus frameworks. Much like with multi-cloud environments, each of these technologies provides distinct advantages, but having a team with deep expertise across all of them is uncommon.
The challenge isn’t DevOps itself, nor multi-cloud, Kubernetes, application maturity or the framework(s) used per se. Instead, the issue is often taming this complexity. Finding technology-specific solutions that can help developers handle all these variables while effectively simplifying and streamlining operations can address these difficulties and fully reap the advantages of the cloud.
Solutions that drive simplicity are the future
Forward-thinking organisations are increasingly focusing on simplification, with the most resilient enterprises learning to combine multiple strategies. These include platform engineering, to create consistent, opinionated, self-service environments that abstract away infrastructure and accelerate delivery; managed services, to reduce operational burden by offloading routine maintenance to providers, freeing teams for higher-value work; automation to drive efficiencies and handle repetitive tasks.
This is where an opinionated, unified platform that relies on automation, such as Payara Qube for Java workloads, comes in. It slashes cloud infrastructure maintenance and configuration, reducing boilerplate as well as decision fatigue.
Instead of forcing teams to reinvent the wheel, a such solution can help simplify DevOps activities by offering one-click application deployments and maximum visibility. These features, in turn, can help reduce overhead and technical barriers, improving productivity, while achieving high flexibility, cost control, portability and compliance. As a result, companies can focus on innovation while having control over their cloud strategies, so that they truly add value.
Ultimately, developers should not be asked to master every nuance of cloud solutions, Kubernetes or frameworks. In fact, they can rely on ever more advanced and refined tools that bring the power of these technologies into the development workflow.
Enterprises that succeed will be those prioritising developer experience and automation as well as making strategic choices about which complexity to manage and which to offload. The future of cloud is about thoughtful abstraction, reducing cognitive load for developers and freeing teams to focus on what really matters: building great applications that deliver value.
Payara Services is a finalist in the Cloud Excellence Awards 2025.
About the author:
Louise Castens is the Head of Product at Payara, bringing over 15 years of experience in product management. She excels at guiding product strategies, developing cloud-native Java solutions like Payara Qube, and driving innovation. Louise is recognised for delivering business value, overseeing platform roadmaps, and actively sharing her expertise at industry events.