Customers don’t care about your data centers — and neither should you
Focus on your product and customer experience — and let AWS focus on the undifferentiated heavy lifting
Mischief Managed
For a quick glimpse of the future that is now, developing Alexa skills for the Amazon Echo offers a simple case study. My youngest daughter designed two Alexa skills called “PotterHead Quiz” and “Sorting Ceremony”.
So far, my daughter has earned well over $5,000 in monthly incentives as a top “developer” for her Alexa skills. She is using the earnings to join her high school trip to London — and purchased two shares of AMZN.
By taking advantage of free training and templates, the skills were designed, developed, tested, and deployed within 24 hours — without a data center or any knowledge of ansible, git, jenkins, chef, or kubernetes. She focused entirely on the customer experience.
Since the launch, her Harry Potter skills have more users and interactions than all my other Alexa efforts combined, and probably more than many company-sponsored skills on Amazon’s emerging voice platform. Her product is attracting an average of 500 unique users who interact with her skill over 5,000 times — every week.
Work backwards from the customer
The best software engineers already focus on eliminating the friction between converting their ideas and raw coding materials into consumable value. These “heads-up” engineers focus on subtraction using emerging patterns like serverless architecture, and embrace the complexity of simplicity.
Beyond the technology, they strive to understand their companies value chain that delivers upon customer needs. Doing so allows them to clearly identify and eliminate the constraints impeding the flow of value to the consumer. They are locked onto the customer, and relentlessly engineer their way closer to their needs.
Frictionless innovation means that anyone can seamlessly deploy and scale new products and services into the hands of a global customer base — letting the market determine product viability.
The rapid commoditization of compute and development services into utilities is already shifting more focus toward the ideas that differentiate products in the marketplace — and away from the underlying means to develop or deliver.
FWIW — not a single user of my daughter’s Alexa skill has inquired about her choice of cloud provider, developer tools, or container standard.
Have you toured our awesome data center?
It is well worth the price of admission to visit a corporate data center. The scale of most enterprise data centers are hard to comprehend until you’re standing in the middle of 5 acres of servers and storage arrays — that’s 4 football fields worth of heavy iron.
Corporate data centers are a marvel of modern engineering. Similar to what a power plant might look like in the Emerald City of Oz — albeit with a lot more people behind the curtain.
These state-of-the-art industrial power plants are energized by their own substations, with massive emergency generators for backup power, and tractor trailers of uninterruptible power supplies. The electrical and mechanical systems have all been designed to avoid a single point of failure — including multiple power paths.
Massive water pipes channel chilled water throughout the facility. The cooling process is powered by multiple massive mechanical centrifugal chillers and immense water tanks.
The facilities are guarded 24x7, and the physical perimeters are designed to create a secure fortress around the customer data stored inside. To guard against Mother Nature, many data centers have the capability to withstand an F5 tornado with winds up to 360 mph.
ProTip #1: Awesome Data Centers Don’t Attract Customers
What’s even more impressive than a visit to a corporate data center? The massive costs to build, maintain, and operate these modern-day power plants.
Given the significant investment and passion around building private clouds, you’d assume the Consumer Report scores on corporate data centers is a key criteria when customers shop for products or services.
The reality is that consumers don’t care about the electricity used to manufacture a product — they simply purchase the best appliance and plug into the nearest outlet. Same goes for digital services — customers just plug their ephemeral product into the computing grid via APIs and off they go!
The electrical grid eliminated the need for most manufacturing plants to generate their own power. The ubiquity of the computing grid — powered by companies like Amazon Web Services — eliminates the need for companies to build their own compute. Hell, it even eliminates the need for companies to build their own traditional ITIL operations.
These days, friends don’t let friends build data centers. If you need to stage an intervention, bring a copy of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google by Nicolas Carr.
Checkout our badass CI/CD tools!
The power of the public cloud’s software-defined infrastructure unleashed the power of DevOps. Finally, developers have direct access to instantaneously provision compute, network, and storage systems via an API — no more waiting weeks for a ticket to be serviced in the on-premises data center by Central IT Operations.
The self-reliance enables a strong movement to federate technology teams directly into the product-oriented value streams. With the umbilical cord cut from Central IT, the local teams are now empowered to create their own development factories that reflect their specific needs — often without consideration to the larger system.
The result is an explosion of CI/CD patterns that multiply like tribbles throughout the enterprise. Most of the pipelines reflect the specific passion and expertise of the developers leading the local tribe — each with solid justification about why their amalgamation of CI/CD tools is superior.
ProTip #2: Badass CI/CD tools don’t attract customers either
The explosion of unique combinations of CI/CD tools throughout an organization are both unnecessary and counterproductive. The majority of enterprise DevOps continuous delivery pipelines are science projects that work locally, but are detrimental to the well-being of the overall system you’re working within.
Disclaimer: I understand that I’m treading on hallowed ground which involves passionate engineers and their sacred tools. Before I get trolled too hard, I want to be clear about a few things: Continuous delivery pipelines are essential for survival.Continuous integration and continuous tools are table-stakes. Do not pass go and collect $200 without CI/CD tools & techniques.If you don’t have a DevOps mindset, go directly to jail.
Similar to the commoditization of infrastructure into a compute grid by AWS, a similar story is playing out with the continuous delivery pipeline. With the announcement of CodeBuild as a new addition to the existing suite of AWS Developer Tools, there are less and less reasons to roll your own pipeline.
The obvious rationale is tied to redirecting skilled software engineers to focus on code that differentiates your product in the marketplace, versus building and maintaining utility pipes.
Leveraging a commoditized delivery pipeline has a few other key advantages that enterprises should consider:
- If AWS is dogfooding these services, there’s probably some merit
- Training thousands of your engineers on the delivery pipeline tools becomes a hell of a lot easier than explaining tribal knowledge
- New hires with prior experience on these AWS development services, or internal transfers to new divisions, can be productive on day one
- Standard practices can reduce operational costs and increase quality
- You inherit the resiliency and scalability of services out-of-the-box
- If a new feature is needed, Jeff Barr probably announced it yesterday
It won’t be too much longer before friends don’t let friends build their own continuous delivery pipelines. And if you still need to stage an intervention, just have them follow Simon Wardley on Twitter and Medium for some shock therapy.
About the Author
AWS Community Hero, Alexa Champion, and maker of dad jokes.
Follow me on Twitter @drewfirment.
#WePowerTech
