Category: cloud

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cloud hacks payments security startup strategy support tools

Tech Stack for Payments

Your business is growing and you are considering expanding your offering to new verticals. The next phase, if you haven’t done it already, is to add payments and ‘quilty-of-life’ tools to help your teams. A good start tech stack for a business which is growing and adding new products is in the diagram. This is the time to also rigorously review your whole tech stack and start taking things out. Carve out 2 weeks every quarter to spend on the tech stack to stay on top of it in terms of cost, usefulness and to ensure you are using tools fit for purpose. Your business has evolved and what worked during the first 6 months might not work now.

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cloud decisions design hacks leadership program security startup strategy team tools

Tech Stack for Growth

So you have launched. You figured out how to make money and you are ready to grow. A good tech stack for growth businesses is depicted in the diagram. Gowing the business usually requires more people. So your tech stack will need to expand to include user management tools. My guidance here is to make sure you figured out what’s available from Gsuite or Office 365 before adding new complexity. By the way, you should only use either Gsuite or Office 365. Never both. Remember to always avoid complexity. If you like us and many other businesses, you will have Macs and Windows. You should also understand Gsuite or Office 365 offering for user kit management before adding new tools. As a growing business, you will consider adding new customer channels. We added fairly quickly telephony and webchat and also integrations to other (non-core) services. You don’t want to build any of this unless it’s your USP which is very unlikely. Finally, remember to constantly review your technology stack to continuously remove legacy.

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cloud design hacks innovation startup strategy system tools

Tech Stack for Launch

So you are ready to launch an MVP or ‘open-to-all’ service? Scary, right? Preparing for launch it’s never easy. Bear in mind that no one has many users to start. However, if you have keen investors or an active board, the pressure is on. A good start tech stack is depicted in the diagram. The big difference is analytics and tools the business needs to make a success out of the launch. So a lot of new tools are added to facilitate timely and accurate product usage tracking. Finally, marketing and support tools will make or break the business so overinvest in figuring what works for you. Challenge arguments based on people’s previous experiences. (We used MailChimp at X). Also, remember to constantly review your technology stack to continuously remove legacy.

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cloud code decisions design system

Tech Stack for Early Startup

When you start to build your business it’s often hard to work out what you need in the first 3-6months. A good start is depicted in the diagram. I think in terms of what makes teams productive so Tech Stack is divided between Ops, Product & tech and Sales & Marketing. If you operate in a highly regulated market you could have for example regulatory reporting in the compliance vertical. I constantly aim to review our technology stack to continuously remove legacy.

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cloud code decisions design patterns startup strategy

Microservices dependencies are difficult to track

After building online mortgages website and backend systems (integrated with top UK banks) using microservices (Azure, NodeJS, Mongo, React) for the new project I picked a less ambitius stack while leveraging teams know how (Azure, NodeJS, MySQL, templated HTML). This article captures my thinking:

  • Fail fast – they let development teams focus on delivering features (to prove or disprove a hypothesis) rather than a complicated microservice architecture
  • It helps you to understand your requirements (UML diagrams and domain models are not perfect first time they need to evolve)
  • Microservices are complicated to develop (e.g. graceful degradation, health checks, retries) and monitor
  • Microservices dependencies are difficult to track
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cloud code other patterns

Big Data anti-pattern

Installations of Hadoop with Gb data feeds that would be faster processed on a laptop.

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cloud future innovation other

Virtual Reality HoloLens

At London’s Future Decoded, Nadella frequently referred to HoloLens, the augmented-reality headset the company is deploying in early 2016. “If you change the way you see the world, you change the world that you see,’ he said on stage, pointing to the ‘augmented’ aspect of the headset. It’s clear to see that HoloLens will be a big part of Microsoft’s future offerings to businesses.

Other soundbites included:
– Mobile-first, cloud-first
– Data from exhaust to fuel
– Lagging indicators like revenue, profit vs leading indicators like usage

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cloud other system

Building Asset Management Platform

Don’t build one platform. Build many interlinked apps. This will let you create a solution that is faster to change, easier to test and cheaper to build.

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cloud decisions other

SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, on-prem

Only a few years ago, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS options didn’t exist. If the motivation is to have scalable IT, start with SaaS options and move down the value chain. Picking on-perm or even IaaS requires a solid business justification today.