a "Hypothetical" future proofed company

Could this be the beginning of something new?
A New way of looking at things?

One thing for certain is the future of technology is dynamic and changeable. In our very hands, the only thing that hinders it is the motivation for the technology to be created, to be used! 

The key lesson from all these trends is we’re entering an era of continual and rapid evolution, where multiple tech trends combine and feed into each other to deliver huge changes. For businesses, this means the days of incremental tech upgrades are gone forever. Continual change is the way of the future.

We are currently witnessing unprecedented rates of innovation across many industries, and experts predict that the ways that we work, communicate, and travel will radically transform over the next 15 to 20 years. Paradigm shifts always entail challenges, but it’s important to remember that they also bring an abundance of opportunity.

Moreover, technology is not a static concept. It is always evolving, dynamic, and volatile. This is bringing about a paradigm shift in the way we think, act, buy, and make a decision. BE it genomics and advanced DNA for spousal choices or autonomous vehicles, the world is fast embracing digital. If you too want in on this high impact sphere of technology then the first step would be to know the different trends that will propel the digital transformation pace in 2002 and beyond. Read on to know what these trends are

Companies need to embrace change.

Those companies that don’t change can stagnate and not develop. We can see case studies ranging from large companies such as Kodak not adhering to this and facing the consequences. Our current world is constantly evolving in terms of technology and many other challenging but innovative ways. Having the ability to face these new challenges head-on will not only develop the company as a whole but also those who work within it.

Today’s younger workers have no qualms in changing jobs if their expectations are not met. Future generations are going to need to adapt to persistent new technologies and have developed a mindset that embraces autonomy, purpose and motivation. Employee’s value growing their skills and building career currency through experiences, rather than climbing the corporate ladder.

Executives must be able to play the long game because what we’re talking about is not simple. In some cases, there’s significant cost to making the type of change we’re talking about. But the long-term payback is ensuring that your organisation has the technological capabilities to be competitive.

Technology will continue to drive the future.

It is clear that technology is coming up in a big way to drive customer experience. If you are not taking initiatives for digital transformation then you are bound to be outpaced by forwarding looking enterprises with a focus on stellar customer experiences.

It’s easy to focus on the fear or to think of technology as the enemy. But this kind of mindset is the quickest path to becoming obsolete. To remain relevant in this digital world, we have to embrace technology solutions and be open to change. To future-proof your career, you need to prepare yourself for a changing, technology-dependent workforce.

Future-proof your company with Serverless technology.

As technology is exponentially growing and bringing new challenges for maintaining the dependencies, Serverless will become a great solution. Although this technology is new, it will be more and more crucial in the coming decades.

Serverless is a very promising solution for edge applications as it allows to perform tasks on-site instead of a inside a core network (Virtual or Physical), it is usually cheap and light and speed up transactions while lowering operating costs by only the required resources. For example, some operations like verifying a signature, hashing data, or even performing a simple media transformation require faster response times and do not necessarily require a lot of computing power; they can therefore be run on Content Delivery Networks where some of the data is replicated.

Serverless architecture provides a way to keep the business focused on itself and its own core application. and therefor, you don’t have to worry about having an entire team of infrastructure engineers, platform engineers, admins, etc. The application team could be strictly in charge of that since the hosts handle everything else.

Use software as a service to save time and money.

Although, there can be a paradigm shift to get there, the journey might not be a simple lift and shift. For example, if you have certain customisied workloads that you require from an infrastructure level, you may have to re-engineer your solution to enable to function to be ported across. A classic example of this will always be older technology adopted that cannot be ported to the virtual and unstable world of the Cloud and requires a whole Operating System underlying to function.

Saying that, if you have a versatile workload that is movable you can gain a lot from this paradigm. You may be able to evaluate the older technology and use, Software as a service, another company that is providing the technology in a Cloud based way that you can consume.

Integrate DevOps and security operations to improve efficiency and safety.

As you integrate security into your DevOps pipeline, remember that people are still your greatest asset. In the traditional waterfall model, the development, security, and operations teams are siloed. As you move into the DevOps world, teams may still operate that way for a while; breaking down those traditional barriers can be the first and most important catalyst to your DevSecOps journey. Try to identify and remedy those silos quickly, create shared goals within DevSecOps teams, and drive a culture of innovation that consists of openness, transparency, ownership, and accountability. While the human resource hierarchy may remain separated, the development culture should be product-based and therefore lead by product teams. Each responsible party (dev, sec, ops) owns a portion of the product success.

If your company already does DevOps, then it’s a good idea to consider shifting toward DevSecOps. At its core, DevSecOps is based on the principle of DevOps, which will help your case for making the switch. And doing so will enable you to bring together proficient individuals from across different technical disciplines to enhance your existing security processes.

Unlike in collaborations between development and security, complexities arise when bringing together ops and security. In the former pair, you simply have to teach your developers about security best practices and have them work closely with your security team. Although this arrangement does change some things for developers, usually not many significant changes are found.

Wrap Up

Albeit the above is just fluffy principles (for now) in future threads of this blog we can begin to start to look towards how the small elements that build up a company from the ground up can be harnessed in greater detail and maybe with some case study material if time permits.

The difference in building across clouds!

An Unbiased Opinion of ALL Public Cloud Vendors

If I start to repeat myself in day to day I like to come here to write up the result, partly to vent from the frustration of repeating myself but also to redirect and teach others. As an engineer there is a need to "solve a problem" for good and that is what has driven this post.

If I have said it once, I have screamed it a thousand times. There are many key differences between the big three (four?) cloud providers when it comes to the DevOps Lifecycle. Through out my career at Cloudreach I have witnessed many clients with different motivations all wanting to migrate to the cloud, in some cases migrating between clouds as the original choice did not serve it's purpose.

Which Cloud is the Best?

The true answer is that none of them are the best, it all depends on the companies motivation, and much like selecting technology for your company to use, you need to have a look around firstly at the talent at your disposal, what are the engineers comfy with. There is a way to cheat this a little with automation discussed below.

I have seen too many articles (that I wonder if they were paid for on some level) saying "Their" Cloud is the best and another cloud is rubbish. Many of these I feel stem from a lack of understanding with working with the Cloud platform for a prolonged period.

Azure

I am known as a "Microsoft Hater" and I have my reasons (maybe I will go in to in a Future blog) and it is true that I do not think the most of the company. However, I will admit that for companies that are looking to move directly out of a data centre without changing much, Azure is the way forward. It can provide a fast exit while allowing Information Technology departments to maintain their old policies as you can create a Data centre in the Cloud. This should not be confused with "going cloud" where an enterprise will adopt the antive principles of Cloud Technology and even embrace the chaos of virtual workloads, in Azure, there technology stack is not so good... plus all the security issues that have happened in recent years. CosmoDB anyone? 

AWS

AWS is the all-rounder, they were on of the first to appear having taken the Open Stack framework and run with it, they were the first to market and have had to build with raw elements to cope with new and varied workflows as enterprise discovered how they would adopt the Cloud. Because of this the amount of tooling available from AWS is enormous. Each element catering for a different tool set and circumstance as they push cloud native strategies that force their users to break the mould. Of course with this comes a lot of configuration to main and run your account at peak, a lot of companies and users can get annoyed at this as it can be hard to write the automation to provision all of these services and it will be time consuming for a team to manually implement, especially when you bring things like AWS Orgs into the picture for good practice and security. 

AliBaba... effectively AWS

AliBaba is effectively a rip off of AWS but with less services, should you need to operate in China, I would suggest using this provider as they are already set up behind the great firewall. Their toolkit is essentially the same as AWS, to the point I would wonder if they ripped the code from inside AWS some how to market as their own. Even some of the documentation bares a similar feel with interesting translations.

Either way, it is a public Cloud platform and has its own pros and cons like any other platform.

GCP

GCP is probably the newest for the classical offerings of Cloud, if you don't count the years it spent offering GAPS (Google Applications Service). And with that it has been created differently which gives an interesting twist to the classic check list.

I have found that much like working with the Go programming language, using GCP is very much "Do it the Go/Google/GCP way or pick another platform". This can be great as there can often be less to configure for the setup and a small business can achieve maximum efficiency and security pretty simply with the recommended defaults. However, this sadly falls down when an obscure workload that Google has not found before is required, there just isn't the level of customisability as a more mature platform such as AWS.

Short Verdict 

As you can see that no Cloud is actually the best, like most tools, it depends on what you are doing with it which will mandate what you choose to use! 

Automation

Cloud providers typically offer a native infrastructure as code language that exclusively supports the deployment of resources to their cloud platform. For AWS, that offering is a service called AWS CloudFormation. There are other tools on the market, some of which are sometimes described as “cloud agnostic” due to their ability to support the deployment to multiple cloud providers, which we will discuss in further detail later.

However, if you are looking to provision services on multiple cloud platforms, Terraform is your go-to option. While Terraform supports all cloud vendors like AWS, GCP, Azure, and many others, CloudFormation is confined only to AWS. So, in case your environment involves multiple cloud deployments, Cloudformation is not for you. Suppose you are using AWS resources like EC2, S3, etc., you are best advised to stick to Cloudformation or the platform equivalent. 

Wrap Up!

Cloud Computing has revolutionised the world of DevOps. It is not just a buzzword anymore; it is here and it is here to change the way we develop and maintain our applications. There are very few companies who are not using Cloud Technology as part of their set up to speed up their delivery cadence.

In future posts we will explore the different automations of each of these Clouds and see if we can unite them!