The 3 Unfunded Pillars of Digital Business
A presentation at DevOpsDays Montreal in in Montreal, QC, Canada by Sasha Rosenbaum
The 3 Unfunded Pillars of Digital Business Sasha Czarkowski (Rosenbaum) @DivineOps COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Sasha Czarkowski (Rosenbaum) @DivineOps Dev Ops Product Tech Sales Management Consulting
Ergonautic Is AI winter coming?
Serverless Continuous Delivery Cloud IoT Big Data DevOps Lean Agile Microservices
Reliability Platform Excellence
[Technical] Excellence The opposite of Technical Debt
3 Types of Technical Debt Poor Decisions @ergonauticly Code Age COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Changing World www.ergonautic.ly
Technical Debt All code is technical debt
Why would I spend 2M To continue making 1M? Ergonautic
Platform [Engineering] There’s nothing new under the sun
“You can’t buy DevOps But I can sell it to you” - Matty Stratton Ergonautic
Ergonautic You can’t buy a Platform But I can sell it to you
Ergonautic Is your Platform made of People?
ServiceNow
ServiceNow
Ergonautic One must imagine Brent happy
Reliability = Availability + Stability + Quality + …
1990s: Maintenance windows @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Ergonautic
Monthly downtime > 1.5 days means 100% refund
Shipping SW on CDs Ergonautic
1,000,000… user SaaS Ergonautic
In large organizations, SRE was born out of necessity @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. 2022. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Ergonautic
Toil The ‘goal’ of SRE is not to take the toil away from software engineering, but to drive toil out of the system @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. 2022. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Ergonautic
ServiceNow
seeking advantage seeking legitimacy Ergonautic
words cross the chasm before understanding and practice @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Ergonautic
Renaming Teams Support -> Sys Admin -> Ops -> DevOps -> SRE -> Platform Eng -> (?) @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. www.ergonautic.ly
Renaming Teams … -> DevOps -> … -> (?) @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. www.ergonautic.ly
You cannot step twice into the same Transformation Ergonautic
Serverless Cloud IoT Continuous Delivery Big Data DevOps Lean Agile Microservices
3 Economies @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2022. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Ergonautic
Source: https://blog.jabebloom.com/2020/03/04/the-three-economies-an-introduction/
Differentiation Business Units Scale IT Operations GET MORE CUSTOMERS CONTROL CONSUMPTION ENTER NEW MARKETS USE BEST PRACTICES DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY DO THE SAME THINGS REPEATEDLY Ergonautic
The sides maximize local wins according to local rules of the game Ergonautic
The Scope economy connects Differentiation and Scale to enable innovation and efficiency. @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. 2022. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Ergonautic
The Scope economy emerges from an ongoing negotiation between selfish interests in favor of the collective @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. 2022. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Ergonautic
Funding The unfunded pillars
We could talk about funding We would NOT get very far @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Ergonautic
Why would I spend 2M To continue making 1M? Ergonautic
The challenge is… @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Ergonautic
The 3 pillars belong to the 3rd (Scope) Economy @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Ergonautic
Translate your pillar into revenue or cost - get funded
Google: 500ms of latency dropped traffic by 20% https://www.gigaspaces.com/blog/amazon-found-every-100ms-of-latency-cost-them-1-in-sales/
Let’s all use the 4 Golden Signals! Can you connect them to revenue, costs or customer experience? @ergonauticly Latency Traffic Errors Saturation COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. www.ergonautic.ly
Ergonautic Half a second of latency doesn’t matter!
The narrative must be meaningful to your business @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Ergonautic
Reliability Platform Excellence Organizational Purpose
Customer Support call volume @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Ergonautic
“It doesn’t matter to the business if the parts of your system work together internally the way you intended; the business only cares about qualities of the system output.” - Casey Rosenthal
Measure improvements in system output - get funded
Meaningful metrics @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Ergonautic
Metrics are difficult to get right
Metric is meaningless if it does not impact decisions @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Ergonautic
Metric is meaningless without a narrative @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Ergonautic
Shared Metrics Reliability Platform Excellence Organizational Purpose
Winning Practices, like Platforms, are specific to your business @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Ergonautic
Shared Metrics Shared Practices Shared Resources Reliability Platform Excellence Organizational Purpose
Leadership matters @ergonauticly COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Ergonautic
BE (technically) EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER
Thank you! Sasha Czarkowski (Rosenbaum) COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Here comes 2024. Budgets have been cut, positions have been eliminated, and IT organizations are expected to do much more with much less, again.
IT departments toil away tirelessly to just keep the infrastructure online, their applications maintained and reliable, often to unrealistic levels (99999999) with very little time to spare for innovation on new products and even improvement of the existing ones.
Despite this (or perhaps because of this) it’s incredibly difficult for IT to convince the business to fund any investment in paying down the technical debt, or improving the platform and reliability.
In this talk, Sasha will frame this into the three pillars of Tech Excellence (reduction of tech debt), Platform Engineering, and Reliability (SRE) on which innovation can thrive. She will show how you make strategic investments in these pillars so you can free your people from keeping the lights on to where innovation happens and value is created.
for free. You
can too.
