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Cloud Ops: The New IT for the Cloud Era

Over the past few months of interviewing and researching dozens of companies—particularly small to mid-sized SaaS businesses—one pattern keeps emerging: the desire to stand up a Cloud Operations (Cloud Ops) organization. It makes sense on the surface. Cloud is now the infrastructure of choice, so naturally, someone needs to “own” it. But what’s unfolding in practice often misses the mark. Many companies are attempting to solve growing cloud complexity by taking all their DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering talent and consolidating them into a Cloud Ops team. The idea? Share them across product teams so no one gets overwhelmed. If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same centralization tactic used by traditional IT for decades. And it's creating the same problems. When Cloud Ops Becomes Old IT in Disguise Here’s the playbook we’re seeing: Move DevOps, SRE, and Ops into a central Cloud Ops team. Let them handle infrastructure, CI/CD, monitoring, and cloud securit...
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Recent posts

Why leaders need to learn the word No!

  Other, alternatives like "Not right now" or "Can we stop working on x and focus on this?” While it's important to meet customer requests, allowing them to get everything they want can negatively impact our employees and take time away from items help all customers. Agile has streamlined the process of request and delivery, but it can also lead to wasting time on less important tasks. To protect our employees and our business, we should focus on the highest priority items that will improve our MESS. M-Maintain Efficient Operations E-Expand Customers or Revenue S-Save Expense S-Security Improvements
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Learn Anti-Leadership from Basecamp

 There are many different articles out there and Twitter comments about the Basecamp drama.  I am not going to post any here because it might seem biased depending on the article.  Google them yourself.  In short, Basecamp made a policy to not allow political discussions at work.  Coinbase did this previously too and applauded Basecamp for it.   Apparently, for years there has been a list of funny customer names at floating around Basecamp.  This list or even the knowledge that Basecamp had a list, was disturbing to some employees.  Also, some employees tried to start a Diversity and Inclusion practice.  Despite how much the founders of Basecamp promoted DI, they didn't feel they were being taken serious.  They felt the company was only about the founders and not about employees.    If this isn't enough, the founders debated and even called out employees for their comments regarding the topics, publicly.  This is my s...
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Character and Integrity above all

 How do you lead without stress?  I am finding that many leaders are under a lot of pressure, not healthy and not sleeping well.  A good leader may have ups and downs but their trust should never be questioned.  Your day to day work will be hard and require a lot but when you know you are making decisions with high integrity and treating your employees right, you should sleep well each night.   Each day is a new day.  You should begin each day with some quiet time, exercise and make a plan.  Then, you do your best that day.  Solve problems, help your team, mentor leaders, architect or remove toil.   Above all, do everything with character and integrity because when things get hectic or when you have to move on, you know you led with trust and integrity.   People will remember the way you lead more than what you did.  If you are weak in an area, hire someone to fill that need or go learn more.  This is part of leadersh...
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Set a Vision and reach goals

 Leaders should be setting the vision for the company or team.  When tech teams are always jumping from priority to priority, they will get frustrated.  When you set the vision, show the team you stand behind it.  Get the buy in from your team.  The companies ability to set a vision for a team or project and work towards it, will set long term culture and retention.  Thoughts: 1. Create a long term vision with short term goals. 2. Use OKRs to communicate the actions and measurements of the goals. 3. Post regular messages or videos about the goal progress. 4.  You may never reach the full vision but you worked toward it. 5.  If you don't the vision or goals, ask around.    Lead with a daily passion for the companies vision.
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Interviewing Tips

 Here are a few tips I recommend. 1. Practice your pitch.  Start with what you want to accomplish in your next role.  Then, highlight your career and accomplishments that build your career testimony to today.  This will be in every interview.  You should even right it down for practice.  The higher the role the better the pitch needs to be.   2.  Research the company and ask questions about them.  Hard questions.  Make them squirm and show they need you.  I asked one panel of senior leaders, can you tell me about your financial stability and budgets for the next year.   In a more technical panel, I asked how they were managing and deploying their containers in the cloud.  They weren't.  There are plenty of jobs out there and you have to find the right fit for you. 3.  Don't talk about what you did or do.  Talk about what you will do.  Don't say "We" do this or "We" use this tool.  Say, "I...
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Job Postings in Todays Market

As I look for my next opportunity to help a company scale and advance their IT organization, I have seen many interesting job postings.   Examples: 1. Must have experience in XYZ framework.  During the interview I asked if they were just now rolling out the framework or was it fairly mature.  The hiring manager says, what is that?  I said it was mentioned 3 times in you job posting.  2.  Many DevOps Directors or even VP of DevOps.  Then, you review the job description and it seems like every buzz word they could find. 3. I talked a recruiter at one company and I couldn't remember where I had heard of them.  Then, I remembered one of their founders was a popular guy in Tech now.  Everything they said they needed, was what the guy promotes all over the world.  How did they lose touch with a founders principles so fast. With all that said, it is really hard to get noticed or get interviews today.  Then, you get on the interview an...
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