Serverless Craic Ep19 Modern CTO and the Modern Cloud

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

We are continuing our series on the modern cloud. During our six part series, we've covered an ‘’Introduction to Modern Cloud’, and talked about the CEO, Product and Developer perspectives.

Today, we're talking about the technical leader or CTO perspective, which is linked to long term value. As CTO, you need to be on top of this because you own the rationale behind the decision to go for modern cloud. It may require a big initial investment despite it being hard to see the pay off at the start. One big pressure 'straight out of the gates' for a CTO is platform choice. You have to bet on a platform. And you have to guess how the platform will evolve in the next 10 years.

You need to base the decision on the business in order to make the right bet on the platform. Another decision to make is picking a platform or staying platform agnostic. You're probably better off minimising your liabilities and your platform by having the thinnest but valuable platform you can get away with to meet those needs.

As CTO, you have to create an environment to encourage evolution. . As you scale up, different factors apply and you may decide that you need to change tack. You need to arm yourself with as many building blocks as possible. You may have separate platforms, or separate ways of building things to support your business model.

Once you're on a modern cloud platform, you need a problem preventing culture. You're thinking about how to build so we don't have any problems as opposed to problem creation culture, where you're celebrating people for fixing stuff that should never have been built in the first place. The well architected framework is a great way to put guardrails in place. You need to empower and enable teams to make decisions. You need to arm them with good principles so that they can assess their choices. As they're starting to pick technologies, they're starting to leverage the building blocks. You need a feedback loop on what works and what doesn't work.

It's a shared responsibility thing. You need to trust your cloud providers in relation to things like HA and availability, and factor that into your decision as well. A good example of that is using industry standards. Look for a standard and use it. Sometimes there's a lack of trust when people don't do that. Companies that have to customise are very small in number and they are pioneers. 99% of companies can use the standard and be very successful. You need to be clear about using standards and not deviating except for a good reason. And usually there's not a good reason. Otherwise it can come back to bite you with issues around data, security etc.

The hardest thing for CTO's is dealing with regulations and compliance, like SOC compliance, for example. At a certain point in time, managed services may not be 100% SOC compliant. But typically, I find over a short period of time, they become compliant. Unfortunately, people go down the 'Build Your Own' route and the teams and orgs that waited, pass them by because they don't have to invest in Ops to maintain their own custom solution with its limitations. You need strategies and solutions for these issues.

In the role of CTO of the modern cloud, sustainability has to be something to start thinking about. Whatever application or stack you build in the cloud, there will eventually be a carbon burn measure for how much carbon you're using. It's a forcing function for all the other practices we have ju

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