Technology Strategy

Everything in moderation - Let's not overdo the DevOps ! Recently, working as a startup CTO and adviser, I have seen what I call a "DevOps" craze. Developers, especially younger ones seem totally swept up in the DevOps revolution. Continuous deployment, auto-scaling groups, hot back-ups, containers etc etc. Many times these implementations, whilst impressive, are unnecessary for the stage of the company or the product development. Many times, they are difficult to document, relatively expensive, difficult to maintain and can be hard to debug. In many circumstances, it would be far easier to have some old-fashioned deployment or back-up scripts until the company or product has some traction in the market and there are the resources available to properly administer the complexity of the DevOps setup.  This is somewhat of a paradox, initially it would seem that by automating many of the mundane operational tasks that the development team face, you would be saving not on...

I am not one for bureaucracy, in fact the contrary. I cringe at unnecessary bureaucracy and regulation. The face is that we are becoming a more highly regulated society, that being stated, I do feel there are some areas where we need regulation to protect the consumer. One such area is the regulation of costs by commodity suppliers, telecommunications, energy, fuel etc. As CTO of a emerging start-up I am responsible for ensuring that our systems run on the latest and most secure technology.  Cloud services provide that scalable infrastructure and so naturally I use them extensively. However, let me tell you a story of one warm Friday night last July. I was just about to go on paternity leave and settling down in my lovely new bath for a Friday night soak, when the phone rang. A chap was phoning from Amazon Web Services (AWS). He politely enquired if I was aware that our company had just incurred over $20 000 dollars of charges transferring some data from Glacier to S3 storage....

Wherever I go lately, I hear the term "cloud computing" or "hey, I am involved in cloud". One would think that this is revolutionary technology a far cry from the way we work today. The reality is that it might be a buzz word. Firstly visualized environments have been around for some time and many of us have been using them for some time now. Smaller companies have been using 3rd party hosts to host their websites etc for years too, almost since the beginning of the Internet. Really there is nothing so amazing about "cloud computing" , except that as a system the Internet along with the providers of hosted services are now advanced enough to offer commercially reliable and stable offerings. I guess a major change is the fact that big corporations are starting to use these services, this creates a number of issues for them - mostly in terms of process and security. I would like to see the term used less for "buzz" and more for what it really is .....