I started my career as a software engineer 20 years ago. Many of us know I’m not alone, Unprecedented Public Cloud Growth And it continues today.
Some cloud providers have their own take on how it should be built.We call this approach platform nativeThey want you to build it the way you use it their service and their touring, all inside their ecosystem. However, the cloud he provider should not dictate how to build and deploy. Instead, you should use open, standards-based tools to make your workloads portable. This allows you to deploy and move your workloads wherever it makes sense to find the best location for geography, price, or performance. your Workload.
Today’s Developer Buying Journey
I made a mistake in choosing the right cloud provider. many of us have But these experiences, both good and bad, have allowed me to see patterns in the selection process. And he found that there are five stages in the developer cloud buying process.
1. Discover. Whether you’re reading Stack Overflow or Reddit threads at events, watching YouTube, or hearing something new anywhere, you’ll be intrigued by cloud services you’ve never heard of. And suddenly you think: what is this? How does this apply to me? How can you help me?
You should ask more questions during your discovery. Your goal is to get answers about what makes a cloud service unique, how it differs from its recognizable counterparts, and the specific value proposition it offers. Whether it’s a commitment to service or anything else, it’s here when you ask “why?”
2. Evaluation. At this stage, we have never wondered and are sure there is something here. It’s time to commit and evaluate your findings. Don’t plan big time commitments. It usually only takes about 15-20 minutes to dive into the document. However, understanding a service or tool and assessing how it differs from what you already know requires digging deeper.
It’s helpful to know exactly what services you’re evaluating, but don’t worry if your knowledge of other cloud providers is a little less. For example, consider a managed Kubernetes offering. If you’re familiar with the competition, you can compare them to Linode Kubernetes Engine.
Here is an excerpt from Evaluation use case Elliot Graebert, Engineering Director at drone manufacturer Skydio, said:
“I can’t declare a better one because the interfaces are pretty similar. The design is crisp and clean, without the feature bloat that is common in AWS and Azure. In my opinion, this simplicity It really helps me get back to deploying, deploying, and writing code for apps.” he adds: “Linode’s incredible speed to launch new k8s clusters appealed to some viewers, and overall node deployment times were solid.”
3. Learn. Now you are ready to proceed to the most important step. The reason is that we invest in the evaluation stage. Several It’s time, but this is when you invest many of your time. As developers, we have millions of projects running in our heads. Now let’s do a little fitting exercise to see if this cloud service is worth it.prepare to invest time learning. The biggest question to answer is will this cloud provider and its solution work for your next project?
4. Build. Are there any engineers who don’t like touching keyboards? But this step often causes problems. We geared ourselves to building MVPs (minimum viable products) when we really needed to build MLPs, or “minimum lovable products.”
MVPs are the bare minimum and you won’t necessarily like them. Of all the MVPs I’ve had in my career, I can’t name one that’s production-ready. In my role today, I love showing developers how to create her MLP. The result is what you can honestly assess if the effort you put into building it is worth the result.
5. Scale. At this stage, we have so many questions. When understanding scale, you’ll want to know how to leverage multiple regions, whether your data is replicated from one point to another for disaster recovery, or simply resides in multiple regions. prize. Think of scale not only from a process perspective, but also from a human perspective. If you need to put more people into this process, what would it be like?
You should also understand the integration process. Find something useful for automation using the CLI or API. We are riding this wave of automation led by Infrastructure as Code (IAC). Processes are scalable, but we know humans aren’t, so we can do more with less. Evaluate the effort it takes to stand up and scale your infrastructure.
Platform Native vs Cloud Native
Cloud selection will continue to be an evolutionary journey. We need to look at it more objectively. When I first stepped into the cloud, I built exclusively with these platforms and tools. All the technical literature available at the time was about specific platforms. But as I grew as an engineer, I started building in a cloud-native way where I could pick up a workload and move it anywhere, giving me more control over what I built. And we did it with the help of open source tools. This has allowed us to adopt unified standards for CI/CD, IaC, containerization, etc.
If all of this matches your thinking and you want to build in this cloud native way, we would love to hear from you. Please contact me or a member of her team to discuss the cloud purchasing process.