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By Rita Okoye
The early days of cloud computing were defined by a straightforward narrative: a simple, on-demand infrastructure that allowed businesses to scale with ease.
That narrative, however, has evolved into a much more complex reality. Today, many large enterprises operate intricate multi-cloud and hybrid environments, a trend that brings with it significant challenges in security, governance, and management.
Omotola Aborisade, a Senior Technical Lead at United Airlines and a newly certified AWS DevOps Engineer – Professional, is a vocal proponent of addressing this complexity head-on. He argues that without a proactive strategy, the very benefits of cloud adoption can be eroded by an unmanageable sprawl of services and tools.
“The cloud has delivered on its promise of agility, but it has also led to what some of us call ‘cloud sprawl’,” Aborisade explains. “We have companies using multiple cloud providers to avoid vendor lock-in, and they are connecting these cloud services to their existing on-premises data centres.
The result is a fragmented and increasingly complex infrastructure that is difficult to secure, monitor, and manage effectively.” This complexity, he notes, is a silent threat to both operational efficiency and a company’s bottom line.
Aborisade points out that the sheer number of tools and services available in the market only adds to the problem.
“There’s a new DevOps tool or service being released every day,” he says. “For a large company, choosing the right tools and making them all work together can become a full-time job. It’s no longer about whether a task can be automated; it’s about how we can automate it consistently across a diverse and distributed landscape.” This issue is a core part of his work at United Airlines, where a strategic approach to technology adoption is paramount.
To combat this complexity, Aborisade advocates for a renewed focus on two key areas: standardisation and observability. “Standardisation is our first line of defence,” he asserts. “We must have a consistent way of provisioning our infrastructure, no matter where it lives. That means using infrastructure-as-code tools to define our environments and creating reusable templates that can be deployed across our entire footprint. It ensures consistency and dramatically reduces the risk of human error.” This approach, he explains, is crucial for maintaining a strong security posture and for ensuring compliance with regulatory standards.
The second area, observability, is about gaining a deeper understanding of the entire system. “Monitoring tells you if a service is down. Observability tells you why it’s down, where the problem is, and how to fix it,” Aborisade explains. “In a multi-cloud environment, where services are talking to each other across different networks, having that end-to-end visibility is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. We need a single pane of glass to view our entire system, regardless of which cloud provider it resides on.”
Aborisade and his team are actively working on building this unified visibility platform. They are integrating various logging, tracing, and metric collection systems to provide a comprehensive view of their entire infrastructure. This will allow them to quickly identify the root cause of an issue, reduce downtime, and proactively prevent future incidents. “This is where we see a real opportunity for AI and machine learning to make a difference,” he adds. “These technologies can help us analyse vast amounts of data and flag anomalies that a human would never catch. They can turn the ‘noise’ of our systems into actionable insights.”
His latest certification, the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional, is a testament to his commitment to navigating these advanced challenges. It demonstrates his ability to design, implement, and manage complex, multi-layered cloud solutions, a skill set that is now more in demand than ever. “The certification process forces you to think about how all the different pieces of the puzzle fit together, from security and compliance to automation and disaster recovery,” he says. “That kind of holistic thinking is essential for solving the complexity problem.”
Aborisade believes that the industry as a whole needs to move beyond the race for new tools and focus on building robust, well-architected systems that can handle the reality of modern IT. He advises companies to invest in the skills of their existing teams and to foster a culture of shared learning. “The solutions to these problems are not just technical; they are cultural,” he states. “We need people who can collaborate across teams and who are willing to think beyond the confines of a single cloud provider.”
His work at United Airlines is a microcosm of the larger trend. He is a pragmatic voice in a field often dominated by buzzwords, reminding us that at the heart of every technological challenge is the need for smart strategy, meticulous planning, and a deep understanding of the fundamentals. He is helping to chart a course for one of the world’s largest airlines, demonstrating that with the right approach, even the most daunting complexity can be managed effectively.
