So if you didn’t know, Dr Ian Malcolm is Jeff Goldblums character in Jurassic Park.
He’s super funny, charismatic as well as gawky and a bit off beat, well it’s Jeff Goldblum right?
BUT…. he says the most poignant line in the whole movie (which is the best film in the whole franchise IMO).
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”
Obviously he’s referring to the ethics behind cloning dinosaurs.
What’s this got to do with Cloud Native JP? I hear you cry….
Well I don’t know about you but I’ve been in a ton of meetings and subsequent programmes/projects where the outcome is to build some amazing digital thing. It doesn’t actually matter about the thing in this instance, what matters is the “how”. By matter I mean the focus of this post.
You know when you start a project and there’s a crazy amount of time spent putting infrastructure together? Or when you want to include an account/profile of some kind and you spend sooooo long building the auth module for sign up and login?
Why? It’s because you can right? But the real product you’re building (let’s call it the Wonderdoohickey), that will deliver value to your sponsor/user/business/government/YOU, isn’t based on how amazing the infra is or your custom login. It’s based on the Wonderdoohickey. Those other pieces are needed, but they aren’t what makes users go ooOOOooooo can I have ten please. THE WONDERDOOHICKEY DOES THAT.
Which means you’ve spent time (and money) on other stuff before you’ve EVEN STARTED on the Wonderdoohickey. You know what happened don’t you?
“You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn’t stop to think if you should”
Yeah you did the Jurassic Park scientist thing.
That’s where going Cloud Native helps. AWS or Azure or whatever cloud provider you choose does the stuff you don’t need to. They have signup/login flows, they have scalable enterprise architecture and their offerings are increasing all the time.
The mindset for adoption is not too dissimilar to when developers leverage patterns. Why grind your gears trying to deal with a challenge that someone has already solved? It’s the same thing. Plus whatever your views on Jeff Bezos, AWS are really really good at what they do. If they weren’t then they wouldn’t have the client list they do.
I also get the fear factor. I was in one meeting with the global IT Director of a very large organisation, who said “Well what happens when AWS goes down?”…. Obviously I smirked and had to suppress incredulity. Then it was pointed out to him that AWS has an uptime SLA of at least 99.99% which is far higher than the outsourced boxes and wires solution his organisation currently used.
And hey if AWS does go down, Netflix, Nasa, Facebook, as well as parts of the UK and US government won’t be able to operate. So if it’s good enough for them, I’m pretty sure it can work for you.
Here’s the pitchy bit so feel free to jump off now……. At side8 we love not building things. We also really love building things. That’s because we want to build your product, and build it quickly using an architecture that is enterprise ready. It means we can focus our skills on the cool stuff ….. like a Wonderdoohickey ;-)
