CLOUDY MUSINGS

I have watched some version of this play out enough times now that it almost feels like a rite of passage for organizations trying to mature their engineering operations. The symptoms are usually familiar. Incidents are happening too often, engineers are burned out, on-call has become something people dread, leadership wants fewer escalations, and somewhere in the middle of all that, someone says, “We need an SRE.” From there, a requisition gets approved, somebody smart gets

Cloud conversations still tend to start in the same place. We talk about scalability, resilience, performance, and maybe security if we are feeling disciplined. Cost usually shows up later (way later), almost like a postscript to the architecture. It is something we validate after the system is live, after usage patterns are real, and after the bill gives us a reason to care. The problem with that sequence is that by the time cost shows up, most of the meaningful decisions ha

I was reminded of Conway’s Law the day I watched an episode of The Bear where Carmy tried to redesign the entire kitchen workflow in the middle of lunch service. Onions were flying. Pans were screaming. Richie yelled “cousin” every twelve seconds. Sydney was five seconds away from either fixing everything or throwing a stainless steel pan into the alley. Half the staff looked like one more missed step would send them into a new career that involved silence and scented candles

Platform engineering isn’t just about standing up Kubernetes clusters or pushing Terraform templates. It’s about creating a team that...

Like a lot of my posts, this conversation came up last week with a customer. As per usual, I figured a quick glimpse into what I've seen...