Designing for Elasticity

One of the great advantages of the public cloud is its elasticity, the ability it gives systems to provision and deprovision resources as workloads increase and decrease. Much has been written about how building RESTful services is crucial to deploying elastic services in the cloud. I concur that writing code loosely coupled with the underlying …

Expand Your Thinking When Architecting in the Cloud

I have been building solutions on AWS since 2008, and even though that sounds like a long time, I have still only scratched the surface of what is possible in the cloud. Every few weeks I get another “Aha” moment when I see problems solved with cloud architectures that would be either too hard, not …

Agility and the Cloud

When people hear the word agile, they usually think of words like scrum, kanban, and velocity. Agile methodologies are geared toward churning out faster iterations of software, but the speed of software development does not always correlate to an organization being agile. What makes an organization agile is when the software that is being delivered …

Cloud Deployment Approach: Avoiding the Dark Side

By now, we have all heard the success stories in which companies have increased their agility, lowered costs, reduced their data center footprint, built impressive high-scale systems, or gained competitive advantages by leveraging cloud computing services. But for every success story, there are one too many companies that struggle to capitalize on the promise of …

Agile Transformation Success Story at Valpak

As a consultant, I have witnessed numerous organizations struggling with implementing agile. Agile fail patterns is a topic I have written about often (here, here, and here). Every now and then, I stumble across a company that is having great success with agile. One of the best success stories I have ever seen is from …

AWS re:Invent 2013 Recap — Taking On the Enterprise

This week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) held its second annual re:Invent conference. For the past two days, Amazon has been announcing a wide variety of feature enhancements to existing services as well as publicizing new services. Even before these announcements, AWS was so far ahead of their competition in features, customers, and rate of innovation that comparing competitors’ offerings to AWS was almost comical.